Conceptual and Systematic Design Approach for XML Document Warehouses

Abstract

EXtensible Markup Language (XML) has emerged as the dominant standard in describing and exchanging data among heterogeneous data sources. The increasing presence of large volumes of data appearing creates the need to investigate XML Document Warehouses as a means of handling the data. In this paper our focus is twofold. First we utilise Object Oriented (OO) concepts to develop and propose a conceptual design formalism to build meaningful XML Document Warehouses (XDW). This includes: (1) XML (warehouse) repository (xFACT) using OO concepts followed by the transformation of XML Schema constructs and (2) Conceptual Virtual Dimensions (VDims) using Conceptual views (Rajugan, Chang, Dillon, & Feng, 2003, 2004). Secondly we address several important outstanding issues related to our proposed design of an XML Document Warehouse. Specifically we note that the xFACT portion is now a complex structure, involving several entities and relationships as opposed to being a simple FACT table as was the case in relational data warehouses, and the notion of Virtual Dimensions (VDims) has considerably greater complexity.

Conceptual workflow for complex data integration using AXML

“…The main purpose of such approaches is to enable a native XML storage of the warehouse, and allow querying it with XML query languages, mainly XQuery. Several researchers address the problem of designing and building XML warehouses, focusing either on Web data warehousing [6], [7], [8], XML data warehousing [9], [10], [11], [12], or XML document warehousing [13], [14], [15].…”

A high performance integrated web data warehousing

“…Table 1 summarizes the existing approaches. The common works in [11,[26][27][28] deal with the modelling concept. The authors of these papers propose an object-oriented model to handle relational data extended to object data and different types of data semantics at a conceptual design level.…”

“…Therefore, these distributed data must be incorporated in order to fulfill the business requirement. [27,28] propose a conceptual object-oriented design to handle a huge amount of XML documents that are the only data source needed in a data warehouse system. The proposed techniques consist of the adoption of the UML tool to conceptually capture users' requirements and creation of a virtual object-oriented data warehouse model.…”

Finding an application-appropriate model for XML data warehouses

“…As in [6], the authors use XML views to define dimensions over the XML warehouse data. This work has been complemented in [46] and an associated methodology for the definition of user requirements has been defined in [47].…”