Automatic validation of requirements to support multidimensional design

Article history: Received 7 October 2008 Received in revised form 9 March 2010 Accepted 11 March 2010 Available online 27 March 2010 It iswidely accepted that the conceptual schemaof a datawarehousemust be structuredaccording to themultidimensionalmodel. Moreover, it has been suggested that the ideal scenario for deriving the multidimensional conceptual schema of the datawarehousewould consist of a hybrid approach (i.e., a combination of data-driven and requirement-driven paradigms). Thus, the resulting multidimensional schema would satisfy the end-user requirements and would be conciliated with the data sources.Most currentmethods follow either a data-driven or requirement-driven paradigm and only a few use a hybrid approach. Furthermore, hybrid methods are unbalanced and do not benefit from all of the advantages brought by each paradigm. In this paperwe present our approach for multidimensional design. Themost relevant step in our framework isMultidimensional Design by Examples (MDBE), which is a novel method for deriving multidimensional conceptual schemas from relational sources according to end-user requirements. MDBE introduces several advantages over previous approaches, which can be summarized as threemain contributions. (i) TheMDBEmethod is a fully automatic approach that handles and analyzes the end-user requirements automatically. (ii) Unlike data-driven methods, we focus on data of interest to the end-user. However, the user may not be aware of all the potential analyses of the data sources and, in contrast to requirement-driven approaches, MDBE can propose new multidimensional knowledge related to concepts already queried by the user. (iii) Finally, MDBE proposes meaningful multidimensional schemas derived from a validation process. Therefore, the proposed schemas are sound and meaningful. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.