Automating conceptual design of web warehouses

Web warehousing plays a key role in providing the managers with up-to-date and comprehensive information about their business domain. On the other hand, since XML is now a standard de facto for the exchange of semi-structured data, integrating XML data into web warehouses is a hot topic. In this paper we propose a semi-automated methodology for conceptual design of web warehouses from XML sources modeled by XML Schemas. In our methodology, conceptual design is carried out by first creating a Schema graph, then navigating the functional dependencies expressed by its arcs in order to derive a correct multidimensional representation. The problem of correctly inferring the needed information is solved by querying the source XML documents and, if necessary, by asking the designer's help. The approach is implemented in a prototype that reads an XML Schema and produces in output the conceptual scheme for the web warehouse.