Title: Enhancing the involvement of decision makers in data mart design

Authors: Fahmi Bargui; Hanêne Ben-Abdallah; Jamel Feki

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Economics and Management of Sfax, Sfax University, Tunisia ' Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, KSA ' Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, University of Jeddah, Jeddah, KSA

Abstract: The design phase of a data warehousing project remains difficult for both decision makers and requirements analysts. In this paper, we tackle this difficulty through two contributions. First, we propose a natural language based and goal-oriented template for requirements specification that includes all concepts of the decision-making process. The use of familiar concepts and natural language makes our template more accessible and helps decision makers in validating the specified requirements, which avoids producing data mart that does not meet their needs. Secondly, we propose a decision-making ontology that provides for a systematic decomposition of decision-making goals, which allows new requirements to emerge. This automatic requirements elicitation helps analysts to overcome their lack of domain knowledge, which avoids producing erroneous requirements.

Keywords: decision support system; data warehouse; data mart; requirements engineering; multidimensional modelling; goal-oriented requirements engineering; automatic reasoning; ontology.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDATS.2019.098820

International Journal of Data Analysis Techniques and Strategies, 2019 Vol.11 No.2, pp.148 - 175

Accepted: 09 Jul 2017
Published online: 03 Apr 2019 *

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