A Framework for a Multidimensional OLAP Model using Topic Maps

The goal of a data warehouse is to integrate applications at the data level. Data warehouse architectures are developing in response to our increasing data and information requirements. The traditional notion of data warehouses is evolving into a federated warehouse augmented by a set of processes and services to support integrated and consistent access to heterogeneous, decentralized warehouse systems. The evolution of data warehouses into knowledge repositories requires an architecture supporting the information acquisition from heterogeneous sources. In this paper we propose a framework using XML Topic Maps (XTM) as a foundation for the combination of Web OLAP and data warehouse resources by integrating schema information and addressing semantic heterogeneity. This aims at providing, managing and exploiting a set of integrated data warehouses for knowledge management and decision support.