Issues in Data Warehouse Requirements Engineering

The central role of a decision in data warehouse development is established in this chapter. It is shown that there are three types of decisions, for policy formulation, making policy enforcement rules and for business operations. The problem of requirements engineering is to discover these decisions as well as the information, the requirements granules, relevant to these. A data warehouse fragment is built for each granule. The factors that facilitate eliciting of requirements granules are identified. Finally, a requirements engineering process is outlined that subsumes consolidation of requirements granules.