Automating the schema matching process for heterogeneous data warehouses

A federated data warehouse is a logical integration of data warehouses applicable when physical integration is impossible due to privacy policy or legal restrictions. In order to enable the translation of queries in a federated approach, schemas of the federated and the local warehouses must be matched. In this paper we present a procedure that enables the matching process for schema structures specific to the multidimensional model of data warehouses: facts, measures, dimensions, aggregation levels and dimensional attributes. Similarities between warehouse-specific structures are computed by using linguistic and structural comparison, where calculated values are used to create necessary mappings. We present restriction rules and recommendations for aggregation level matching, which builds the most complex part of the process. A software implementation of the entire process is provided in order to perform its verification, as well as to determine the proper selection metric for mapping different multidimensional structures.