A Data Warehouse Integration Methodology in Support of Collaborating SMEs

Collaborative business making is emerging as a possible solution for the difficulties that Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are having in recent difficult economic scenarios. In fact, collaboration, as opposed to competition, may provide a competitive advantage to companies and organizations that operate in a joint business structure. When dealing with multiple organizations, managers must have access to unified strategic information obtained from the information repositories of each individual organization; unfortunately, traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools are not designed with the aim of collaboration so the task becomes difficult from a managerial, organizational, and technological point of view. To deal with this shortcoming, the authors provide an integration, mapping-based, methodology for heterogeneous Data Warehouses that aims at facilitating business stakeholders’ access to unified strategic information. A complete formalization, based on graph theory and the RELEVANT clustering approach, is provided. Furthermore, the authors perform an experimental evaluation of the proposed method by applying it over two DW instances.