Abstract. Building a data warehouse is a very challenging issue because compared to software engineering it is quite a young discipline and does not yet offer well-established strategies and techniques for the development process. Current data warehouse development methods can fall within three basic groups: data-driven, goal-driven and user-driven. All three development approaches have been applied to the Process Warehouse that is used as the foundation of a process-oriented decision support system, which aims to analyse and improve business processes continuously. In this paper we evaluate all three development methodologies by various assessment criteria. The aim is to establish a link between the methodology and the requirement domain.

Event-based systems are gaining increasing popularity for building loosely coupled and distributed systems. Since business processes are becoming more interconnected and event-driven, event-based systems fit well for supporting and monitoring business processes. In this paper, we present an event-based business intelligence tool, the Event Tunnel framework. It provides an interactive visualization of event streams to support business analysts in exploring business incidents. The visualization is based on the metaphor of considering the event stream as a cylindrical tunnel, which is presented to the user from multiple perspectives. The information of single events laid out in the Event Tunnel is encoded in event glyphs that allow for a selective mapping of event attributes to colors, size and position. Different policies for the placement of the events in the tunnel as well as a clustering mechanism generate various views on historical event data. The Event Tunnel is able to display the relationships between events. This facilitates users to discover root causes and causal dependencies of event patterns. Our framework couples the event-tunnel visualization with query tools that allow users to search for relevant events within a data repository. Using query, filter and highlighting operations the analyst can navigate through the Event Tunnel until the required information or event patterns become visible. We demonstrate our approach with use cases from the fraud management and logistics domain.

Abstract. The amount of information available to large-scale enterprises is growing rapidly. While operational systems are designed to meet well-specified (short) response time requirements, the focus of data warehouses is generally the strategic analysis of business data integrated from heterogeneous source systems. The decision making process in traditional data warehouse environments is often delayed because data cannot be propagated from the source system to the data warehouse in time. A real-time data warehouse aims at decreasing the time it takes to make business decisions and tries to attain zero latency between the cause and effect of a business decision. In this paper we present an architecture of an ETL environment for real-time data warehouses, which supports a continual near real-time data propagation. The architecture takes full advantage of existing J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) technology and enables the implementation of a distributed, scalable, near real-time ETL environment. Instead of using vendor proprietary ETL (extraction, transformation, loading) solutions, which are often hard to scale and often do not support an optimization of allocated time frames for data extracts, we propose in our approach ETLets (spoken "et-lets") and Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) for the ETL processing tasks.

Event-based systems have been developed and used to implement networked and adaptive business environments based on loosely coupled systems in order to respond faster to critical business events. In this paper, we introduce a rule management system which is able to sense and evaluate events in order to respond to changes in a business environment or customer needs. It enables users to graphically compose comprehensive event-triggered rules, which can be used to control the processing of services. For the definition of a rule set, users can independently define event conditions, event patterns and correlation-related information which can be combined for modeling complex business situations. We have fully implemented the proposed system with a serviceoriented approach and illustrate our approach with an order management business case.

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