A logical model for data warehouse design and evolution

A data warehouse is a software infrastructure which supports OLAP applications by providing a collection of tools for data extraction and cleaning, data integration and aggregation, and data organization into multidimensional structures. At the design level, a data warehouse is defined as a hierarchy of view expressions whose ultimate nodes are queries on data sources. In this paper, we propose a logical model for a data warehouse representation which consists of a hierarchy of views, namely the base views, the intermediate views and the users views. This schema can be used for different design purposes, as the evolution of a data warehouse which is also the focus of this paper.