Metadata to Support Transformations and Data & Metadata Lineage in a Warehousing Environment

Data warehousing is a collection of concepts and tools which aim at providing and maintaining a set of integrated data (the data warehouse) for business decision support within an organization. They extract data from different operational data sources, and after some cleansing and transformation procedures data are integrated and loaded into a central repository to enable analysis and mining. Data and metadata lineage are important processes for data analysis. The first allows users to trace warehouse data items back to the original source item from which they were derived and the latter shows which operations have been performed to achieve that target data. This work proposes integrating metadata captured during transformation processes using the CWM metadata standard in order to enable data and metadata lineage. Additionally it presents a tool specially developed for performing this task.