Towards a Framework for Conceptual Modeling of ETL Processes

Data warehousing involves many moves of data from several sources into a central repository. Extraction-Transformations-Loading (ETL) processes are responsible for the extraction of data, their cleaning, conforming and loading into the target. It is widely recognized that building ETL processes, in a data warehouse project, are expensive regarding time and money. During the building phase, the most important and complex task is to achieve conceptual modeling of ETL processes. Several solutions have been proposed for this issue. In this paper, we present our approach, which is based on a framework for modeling ETL processes. Comparing with existent solutions, our approach has numerous strengths. Besides extensibility and reusability, it offers support and guideline to the designer. It has also the advantage to use a shorten notation, to design an ETL. consisting mainly on three components.