Semi-automatic Discovery of Mappings Between Heterogeneous Data Warehouse Dimensions

Data Warehousing is the main Business Intelligence instrument for the analysis of large amounts of data. It permits the extraction of relevant information for decision making processes inside organizations. Given the great diffusion of Data Warehouses, there is an increasing need to integrate information coming from independent Data Warehouses or from independently developed data marts in the same Data Warehouse. In this paper, we provide a method for the semi-automatic discovery of common topological properties of dimensions that can be used to automatically map elements of different dimensions in heterogeneous Data Warehouses. The method uses techniques from the Data Integration research area and combines topological properties of dimensions in a multidimensional model.