Improving the development of data warehouses by enriching dimension hierarchies with WordNet

Abstract

OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) operations, such as roll-up or drill-down, depend on data warehouse dimension hierarchies in order to aggregate information at different levels of detail and support the decision-making process required by final users. This is why it is crucial to capture adequate hierarchies in the requirement analysis stage. However, operational data could not be enough for supplying information to construct every level of these hierarchies. In this paper, we apply knowledge given by relationships among concepts from WordNet to overcome this problem. Therefore, richer dimension hierarchies will be specified in the data warehouse, and OLAP tools will be able to show proper information to improve decision-making process. Decision makers thus will be able to achieve their information needs for analysis. Finally, we will show the benefits of our approach by providing a case study in which a poor hierarchy is enriched with new levels of aggregation. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.