Towards quality-oriented data warehouse usage and evolution

As a decision support information system, a data warehouse must provide high level quality of data and services. In the DWQ project (Foundations of Data Warehouse Quality), we have proposed how semantically rich meta-information of a data warehouse can be stored in a metadata repository. This static representation of the various perspectives of data warehouse components and their linkage to quality factors is complemented by an operational methodology on how to use these quality factors and achieve the quality goals of the users. This approach is an extension of the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) approach, based on the idea that a quality goal is operationally defined over a concrete set of questions, i.e., algorithmic steps. The proposed approach covers the full lifecycle of the data warehouse, allows capturing the interrelationships between different quality factors and helps the interested user to organize them in order to fulfill specific quality goals. Furthermore, we prove how the quality management of the data warehouse can guide the process of data warehouse evolution, by tracking the interrelationships between the components of the data warehouse. Finally, we present a case study, as a proof of concept for the proposed methodology. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.