XCube: XML for data warehouses

Data warehouse systems are nowadays a well known and widely spread approach for supporting management decisions. In several companies or even across companies the idea of integrating several data warehouses into a virtual or federated data warehouse is of growing interest. But the technical and semantic problems are very demanding. An essential part for solving this problem is a standardized, vendor independent format for describing multidimensional data. This paper introduces XCube, a family of XML based document templates to exchange data warehouse data, i. e. data cubes, over any kind of network. XCube is organized in a modular fashion, so the multidimensional schema, the descriptions of the single dimensions and the fact data itself can be transmitted in separate steps. In addition to the describing formats XCube also offers two kinds of dynamic document types that can be used to explore the (multidimensional) content of another warehouse in a vendor independent way. They are primarily meant to reduce the amount of data transferred over the network.