Integrated Toolsupport for Datawarehouse Design

In operational practice, datawarehouses are big corporate databases that are continuously under development. This implies a dynamic increase of the complexity of the data. For controlling this complexity, a conceptual model driven approach is recommended in order to guarantee that the relation to the business environment can be validated at any moment. To keep maintainable the connection between the conceptual model and the logical/physical aspects of the datawarehouse and related data marts, bridges are needed that can provide the needed model-to-model conversion at any desired moment. To achieve this, a bridge-toolset was designed and developed which is based on a single point of definition metadata philosophy. The philosophy and the way of working were developed in a research project at HAN University in The Netherlands in co-operation with the Dutch system house Atos Origin to overcome datawarehouse life cycle maintenance problems in the Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM).