SECRDW: An Extension of the Relational Package from CWM for Representing Secure Data Warehouses at the Logical Level

Abstract

Data Warehouses (DWs) constitute a valuable support to store extensive volumes of historical data for the decision making process. For this reason, it is vital to incorporate security requirements from the early stages of the DWs projects and enforce them in the further design phases. Very few approaches specify security and audit measures in the conceptual modeling of DWs. Furthermore, these security measures are specified in the final implementation on top of commercial systems as there is not a standard relational representation of security measures for DWs. On the other hand, the Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) has been accepted as the standard for the exchange and the interoperability of the metadata. Nevertheless, it does not allow us to specify security measures for DWs. In this paper, we make use of the own extension mechanisms provided by the CWM to extend the relational package to specify at the logical level the security and audit rules captured during the conceptual modeling phase of the DWs design. Finally, in order to show the benefits of our extension, we apply it to a case study related to the management of the pharmacies consortium businesses.