Introduction to the Minitrack on Data Warehousing

An estimated 95 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies either have a data warehouse in place or are planning to develop one [2]. The Palo Alto Management Group predicts that the data warehousing market will grow to a $113.5 billion market in 2002, including the sales of systems, software, services, and in-house expenditures [1]. These trends indicate that data warehousing continues to be an important topic in information systems as companies create data warehouses to transform business processes and create closer ties with their customers and other stakeholders. This minitrack was created to promote research in technical and managerial areas of data warehousing and to showcase efforts that can help companies improve the effectiveness of their warehouse initiatives. It intends to describe how data warehousing will continue to adjust to today's . business environment in support of decision-making, customer relationship, and other applications. Before a data warehouse can meet needs within the organization, data have to be extracted from data sources across the company and combined to create a “single version of the truth.” Unfortunately, this task can be quite arduous as project teams grapple with disparate data sources, large data volumes, and conflicting business rules. Jari Vanhanen, Kai Risku, and Pekka Kilponen present an open architecture for collecting and utilizing data from different sources in “Combining Data from Existing Company Data Sources: Architecture and