I Interscheme Properties’ Role in Data Warehouses

In this article, we illustrate a general approach for the semi-automatic construction and management of data warehouses. Our approach is particularly suited when the number or the size of involved sources is large and/ or when it changes quite frequently over time. Our approach is based mainly on the semi-automatic derivation of interschema properties (i.e., terminological and structural relationships holding among concepts belonging to different input schemas). It consists of the following steps: (1) enrichment of schema descriptions obtained by the semi-automatic extraction of interschema properties; (2) exploitation of derived interschema properties for obtaining in a data repository an integrated and abstracted view of available data; and (3) design of a three-level data warehouse having as its core the derived data repository.