Unification of XML Document Structures for Document Warehouse (DocW)

Data warehouses and OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing) technologies analyse huge amounts of structured data that companies store as conventional databases. Recent works underline the importance of textual data for the decision making process and, therefore, lead to build document warehouses. In fact, documents help decision makers to better understand the evolution of their business activities. In general, these documents exist in XML format, are geographically distributed and described by multiple and different structures. This paper deals with a method to build a distributed document warehouse. This method consists of two steps: i) unification of XML document structures in order to set a global and generic perception/view of the distributed document warehouse, and ii) multidimensional modeling of unified documents for decisional purposes. More specifically, this paper focuses on the unification step.