An Integrative and Uniform Model for Metadata Management in Data Warehousing Environment

Due to the increasing complexity of data warehouses, a centralized and declarative management of metadata is essential for data warehouse administration, maintenance and usage. Metadata are usually divided into technical and semantic metadata. Typically, current approaches only support subsets of these metadata types, such as data movement metadata or multidimensional metadata for OLAP. In particular, the interdependencies between technical and semantic metadata have not yet been investigated sufficiently. The representation of these interdependencies form an important prerequisite for the translation of queries formulated at the business concept level to executable queries on physical data. Therefore, we suggest a uniform and integrative model for data warehouse metadata. This model uses a uniform representation approach based on the Uniform Modeling Language (UML) to integrate technical and semantic metadata and their interdependencies