Data warehouse process management

Previous research has provided metadata models that enable the capturing of the static components of a data warehouse architecture, along with information on different quality factors over these components. This paper complements this work with the modeling of the dynamic parts of the data warehouse. The proposed metamodel of data warehouse operational processes is capable of modeling complex activities, their interrelationships, and the relationship of activities with data sources and execution details. Moreover, the metamodel complements the existing architecture and quality models in a coherent fashion, resulting in a full framework for quality-oriented data warehouse management, capable of supporting the design, administration and especially evolution of a data warehouse. Finally, we exploit our framework to revert the widespread belief that data warehouses can be treated as collections of materialized views. We have implemented this metamodel using the language Telos and the metadata repository system ConceptBase. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.