Can a novel approach streamline data integration in data warehousing? This paper presents a new method for integrating information within a data warehouse, aiming to resolve inconsistencies and redundancies as data moves from application-oriented sources. The technique utilizes a conceptual representation of the data warehouse application domain. Adopting a local-as-view paradigm, the approach defines both source and data warehouse relations as views over this conceptual model. The authors introduce a method for specifying reconciliation correspondences, declaratively resolving conflicts between data from different sources. The primary goal is to facilitate the design of mediators that materialize data within the data warehouse relations. A rewriting algorithm reformulates the query, to load the data in the materialized view. This research contributes to the efficient design of mediators for data warehousing, ultimately ensuring an integrated and reconciled view of organizational data. The method facilitates mediator design by reformulating queries based on source relations and reconciliation correspondences, leading to a precise specification for data loading.
Published in the International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, this paper is relevant to the journal’s focus on distributed and cooperative systems. It addresses a key challenge in data warehousing, a central topic in information systems research. By proposing a novel approach to data integration, the paper contributes to the journal's discourse on advancing information management techniques.