Incorporating the Service-Oriented Architecture into Data Warehouses

Decisional systems are crucial for enterprise improvement. They allow the consolidation of heterogeneous data from distributed enterprise data stores into strategic indicators. An essential component of this data consolidation is the Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) process. In the research literature there has been very few works defining conceptual models for ETL processes. At the same time, there are currently many tools that manage such processes. However, each tool uses its own model, which is not necessarily able to communicate with the models of other tools. In this thesis, we have proposed a solution using some Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) standards. We elaborate a platform-independent conceptual model of ETL processes based on the Business Process Model Notation (BPMN) standard. We also show how such a conceptual model can be implemented using Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), a standard executable language for specifying interactions with web services.