Towards Complex Data Warehousing : A new approach for integrating and modeling complex data

With the development of Internet, the availability of various types of data (multimedia, data from databases, ) has increased. These data which present different forms and semantics (we name them ”complex data”) may be unstructured, structured, or semi-structured. In order to prepare them for proper analysis, a multidimensional modeling layer is needed. To be efficient in terms of quality of service, analysis tools nd their input data to be properly structured and prepared in a previous step. Furthermore, the classical warehousing approach is not very adequate when dealing with complex data. In order to address these issues, this paper presents a generic UML data model capable of representing a wide range of complex data including their possible semantic properties. The second important step in the complex data warehousing process is the preparation of data for the multidimensional modeling. We study this step and demonstrate that we can use data mining techniques to help the user in building a better multidimensional model for complex data.