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 semistructured data, integrating XML data into web warehouses is a hot topic. In this paper we propose a semiautomated 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.