Engineering the Requirements of Data Warehouses: A Comparative Study of Goal-Oriented Approaches

Abstract : There is a consensus that the requirements analysis phase in the development project of a data warehouse (DW) is of critical importance. It is equivalent to application of requirements engineering (RE) activities, to identify the useful information for decision-making, to be met by the DW. Many approaches has been proposed in this field. Our focus is on goal-oriented approaches which are requirement-driven DW design approaches. We are interested in investigating to what extent these approaches went well with respect to the RE process. Thus, theoretical foundations about RE are presented, including the classical RE process. After that, goal-oriented DW design approaches are described briefly; and evaluation criteria, supporting a comparative study of these approaches, are provided.