Toward an Ontology Based Approach for Data Warehousing State of the Art and Proposal

The design process of a data warehouse (DW) raises many problems and then is considered as a complex and tedious task. DW designers follow different levels concerning the design process; among these levels the conceptual level gains a significant care in the literature so far. Recently, using a hybrid approach conjugated to a semantic resource is considered as a successful way for designing a DW that meets the decision makers' requirements, the organization’s operational data source, and the design quality. Many works have been proposed, as well, different approaches or/and methods have been applied for designing a DW. However, still there is not yet a common approach that designers can follow to design a DW. This paper is twofold objectives: First, we conduct a comprehensive survey among proposed works in order to compare their methods based on a set of significant criteria. Secondly, considering the result of this study, we suggest an ontologybased hybrid approach for the DW design. The result is a framework consisting in three main steps: i) Building star schemas based on business-requirements; ii) Building star schemas from an operational data-source; and iii) Matching the two sets of schemas to produce a DW model compliant to user and data source simultaneously. In order to enhance these steps, each one uses an ontology as a knowledge representation to alleviate semantic issues.