An Object-Relational Modeling for Clinical Data Warehouse

Data warehousing is an innovative database concept dedicated to solving the demands of decision support systems. For many years, computerized world have accumulated abundant data of varieties and now realize the importance of using these data for supporting their decision-making. Especially, in the medical world, clinical databases have collected large quantities of data about patients and their medical conditions. Many useful reports could hence be produced and new medical knowledge could be mined as well. Nowadays vastly used physical testing data in multimedia format delivers important components in clinical data. A new data warehouse technology hence is important. In this paper we propose a data model for the heterogeneous data warehouse. This model resembles to the star schema to inherit its easy understanding and multidimensional aspects, and incorporates features of object-relational database to meet the requirements of integrating heterogeneous types of data. In addition, a data model of clinical application is presented and the requirements, problems as well as solutions to it are also discussed