Web data modeling for integration in data warehouses

Sami Miniaoui (1) , Jérôme Darmont (1) , Omar Boussaïd (1)

1 ERIC - Equipe de Recherche en Ingénierie des Connaissances

In a data warehousing process, the data preparation phase is crucial. Mastering this phase allows substantial gains in terms of time and performance when performing a multidimensional analysis or using data mining algorithms. Furthermore, a data warehouse can require external data. The web is a prevalent data source in this context, but the data broadcasted on this medium are very heterogeneous. We propose in this paper a UML conceptual model for a complex object representing a superclass of any useful data source (databases, plain texts, HTML and XML documents, images, sounds, video clips...). The translation into a logical model is achieved with XML, which helps integrating all these diverse, heterogeneous data into a unified format, and whose schema definition provides first-rate metadata in our data warehousing context. Moreover, we benefit from XML's flexibility, extensibility and from the richness of the semi-structured data model, but we are still able to later map XML documents into a database if more structuring is needed.

Mots clés: Multiform data; Data warehousing; Integration; Modeling

Domaines: Base de données [cs.DB]

Sami Miniaoui, Jérôme Darmont, Omar Boussaïd. Web data modeling for integration in data warehouses. First International Workshop on Multimedia Data and Document Engineering (MDDE 2001), Jul 2001, Lyon, France. pp.88-97. ⟨hal-00145441⟩