Data wharehouses: An ontology approach

Although dimensional design for data warehouses has been used in a considerable amount of projects, it does have limitations of expressiveness, particularly with respect to what can be said about relations and attributes properties and restrictions. We present a new way to design data warehouses, based on ontologies, that overcomes many of these limitations. In the proposed architecture descriptive ontologies are used to build the data warehouse and taxonomic ontologies are used during data preparation phase. We discuss the expressive power of Ontology approach showing a semantic comparison with dimensional model both applied to a case study.