An intelligent XML-based multidimensional data cube exchange

Motivated by the globalization trend and Internet speed competition, enterprise nowadays often divides into many departments or organizations or even merges with other companies that located in different regions to bring up the competency and reaction ability. As a result, there are a number of data warehouse systems in a geographically-distributed enterprise. To meet the distributed decision-making requirements, the data in different data warehouses is addressed to enable data exchange and integration. Therefore, an open, vendor-independent, and efficient data exchange standard to transfer data between data warehouses over the Internet is an important issue. However, current solutions for cross-warehouse data exchange employ only approaches either based on records or transferring plain-text files, which are neither adequate nor efficient. In this research, issues on multidimensional data exchange are studied and an Intelligent XML-based multidimensional data exchange model is developed. In addition, a generic-construct-based approach is proposed to enable many-to-many systematic mapping between distributed data warehouses, introducing a consistent and unique standard exchange format. Based on the transformation model we develop between multidimensional data model and XML data model, and enhanced by the multidimensional metadata management mechanism proposed in this research, a general-purpose intelligent XML-based multidimensional data exchange process over web is facilitated efficiently and improved in quality. Moreover, we develop an intelligent XML-based prototype system to exchange multidimensional data, which shows that the proposed multidimensional data exchange model is feasible, and the multidimensional data exchange process is more systematic and efficient using metadata.