BPMN-Based Conceptual Modeling of ETL Processes

Business Intelligence (BI) solutions require the design and implementation of complex processes (denoted ETL) that extract, transform, and load data from the sources to a common repository. New applications, like for example, real-time data warehousing, require agile and flexible tools that allow BI users to take timely decisions based on extremely up-to-date data. This calls for new ETL tools able to adapt to constant changes and quickly produce and modify executable code. A way to achieve this is to make ETL processes become aware of the business processes in the organization, in order to easily identify which data are required, and when and how to load them in the data warehouse. Therefore, we propose to model ETL processes using the standard representation mechanism denoted BPMN (Business Process Modeling and Notation). In this paper we present a BPMN-based metamodel for conceptual modeling of ETL processes. This metamodel is based on a classification of ETL objects resulting from a study of the most used commercial and open source ETL tools.