Combining Mediator and Data Warehouse Technologies for Developing Environmental Decision Support Systems

Governmental and environmental agencies have recognized that Data Warehouses (DWs) oriented to environmental domain can cause a deep impact in the ability to preserve the environment. However, extracting environmental data from external sources in order to load them into the data organization area of a DW is much more complex when compared with conventional DWs. In environmental DWs, extraction is frequently based on autonomous, heterogeneous external sources distributed over the Web. In order to improve this process, this work proposes an architecture that combines a middleware system and DW technology. The use of this architecture has been achieved through the implementation of a tool named LSExtract which has been built on top of a middleware system named Le Select. Its goal is to locate and extract relevant and accurate information from heterogeneous data sources over the Web, extract data published by Le Select and load it, after some transformations, into the data organization area of an environmental DW.