Web Page Extension of Data Warehouses

Abstract

Data warehouses are constructed to provide valuable and current information for decision-making. Typically this information is derived from the organization’s functional databases. The data warehouse is then providing a consolidated, convenient source of data for the decision-maker. However, the available organizational information may not be sufficient to come to a decision. Information external to the organization is also often necessary for management to arrive at strategic decisions. Such external information may be available on the World Wide Web; and when added to the data warehouse extends decision-making power. The Web can be considered as a large repository of data. This data is on the whole unstructured and must be gathered and extracted to be made into something valuable for the organizational decision maker. To gather this data and place it into the organization’s data warehouse requires an understanding of the data warehouse metadata and the use of Web mining techniques (Laware, 2005). Typically when conducting a search on the Web, a user initiates the search by using a search engine to find documents that refer to the desired subject. This requires the user to define the domain of interest as a keyword or a collection of keywords that can be processed by the search engine. The searcher may not know how to break the domain down, thus limiting the search to the domain name. However, even given the ability to break down the domain and conduct a search, the search results have two significant problems. One, Web searches return information about a very large number of documents. Two, much of the returned information may be marginally relevant or completely irrelevant to the domain. The decision maker may not have time to sift through results to find the meaningful information. A data warehouse that has already found domain relevant Web pages can relieve the decision maker from having to decide on search keywords and having to determine the relevant documents from those found in a search. Such a data warehouse requires previously conducted searches to add Web information.