Towards ontology-driven approach for data warehouse analysis. Case study: healthcare domain

Abstract—Understanding, reusing, and maintaining data warehouse resources is a key challenge for data warehouse users. Data warehouses resources are shared by different groups of users. The interpretation of information is subjective, it depends on user knowledge. Thus, a resource, like a data cube, is interpreted differently from a user to another. Unfortunately, misinterpreting data could induce serious problems and conflicts. To guarantee homogenous interpretation of data warehouse resources additional information is necessary. To tackle these challenges we propose to use ontologies to help the users in the exploitation of data warehouses. In this paper we propose an ontology-driven approach that represents data warehouse, dimensions and facts semantically enriched by their equivalent domain concepts and related to final resources provided by this data warehouse. Keywords- data warehouse; ontology; decision information systems; decision making; healthcare institution management I