Business Indicators for Data Warehouse Requirement Engineering

Abstract

Traditionally, data warehouse requirements engineering is oriented towards determining the information contents of the warehouse to be. This has resulted in a de-emphasis of the functional perspective of data warehouses. Consequently, it is difficult to specify functions needed for computing business indicators. The authors' approach aims to elicit needed business indicators from organizational decision makers. Thereafter, indicator hierarchies are built. Then they associate functions with business indicators of the hierarchy. These functions are visualized as use case diagrams. To do this, they extend these diagrams to allow for actor aggregation in addition to actor specialization. Further, they introduce the ‘estimated from' relationship between use cases, in addition to the ‘extend' and ‘include' relationships of UML. They illustrate their proposals with an example.