CommonCube-based conceptual modeling of ETL processes

ETL tools are responsible for the extraction of data from sources, their cleansing and loading into a target data warehouse. However, nowadays, the design and development of ETL processes are performed in an in-house fashion, and need uniformed methodological foundations. In this paper, we will propose a novel conceptual model for the modeling of ETL processes. We employ CommonCubes to represent the cubes in a target data warehouse. CommonCubes release the design of ETL processes from overdependence on the physical schema of the target data warehouse, and enable the designers to pay more efforts to data transforming than data loading when designing ETL processes. Based on the constraint functions on source attributes and the transforming operations on target attributes, we define ETL mappings to capture the semantics of various relationship cardinalities between source attributes and target attributes, which provide a good basis for the design of ETL processes.