Modelling data warehouses and OLAP applications by means of dialogue objects

The idea of data warehouses is to provide condensed information in order to support managers in the analysis of business facts such as sales, costs, profits, etc. along various dimensions such as geography, organisation, time, etc. The analysis should allow fast switches between different selected multiple dimensions at different granularity. The task itself is usually called on-line analytical processing (OLAP). We show in this paper how to model data warehouses with OLAP functionality by means of dialogue objects. These are extended and possibly materialised views on collections of operative databases and couple structural and behavioural aspects of application units.