Veronika Stefanov

Towards Comprehensive Requirement Analysis for Data Warehouses: Considering Security Requirements

Data warehouse (DW) systems integrate data from heterogeneous sources and are used by decision makers to analyze the status and the development of an organization. Traditionally, requirement analysis approaches for DWs have focused purely on information needs of decision makers, without considering other kinds of requirements such as security or performance. But modeling these issues in the early stages of the development is a cornerstone for building a DW that satisfies user expectations. In this paper, we define the two kinds of requirements for data warehousing as information and quality-of-service requirements and combine them in a comprehensive approach based on MDA (model driven architecture). This allows a separation of concerns to model requirements without losing the connection between information and quality-of-service, also in the following conceptual or logical design stages. Finally, in this paper, we introduce a security requirement model for data warehousing, and a three-step process for modeling security requirements, thus illustrating the applicability of our approach with an example.

Extending UML 2 activity diagrams with business intelligence objects

Data Warehouse (DWH) information is accessed by business processes. Today, no conceptual models exist that make the relationship between the DWH and the business processes transparent. In this paper, we extend a business process modeling diagram, namely the UML 2 activity diagram with a UML profile, which allows to make this relationship explicit. The model is tested with example business processes.

A UML profile for modeling data warehouse usage

Data Warehouse (DWH) systems represent a single source of information for analyzing the status, the development and the results of an organization. Todays DWH systems provide many different services to different kinds of users. People involved in designing and managing DWH systems need to see the big picture of how the DWH is being used, to have an overview of the current situation, and to be able to visualize future scenarios. Currently, there is a lack of such general models in Data Warehousing. We introduce the UML Profile for Modeling DWH Usage for modeling the different kinds of DWH usage on a conceptual level. It uses features of UML intended for the purpose of creating abstract, general models. The profile distinguishes four perspectives of usage, and allows to model details of the users. The UML Profile is applied to examples illustrating some of the application scenarios.

Business Metadata for the DataWarehouse

Enterprise organizations use Data Warehouses (DWHs) analyze their performance. Performance is judged regarding the achievement of goals. DWH data models are well established. There exist numerous domain-specific modeling approaches. Enterprises also often model their goals in terms of formal or semiformal goal models. The problem is that these two aspects - the Data Warehouse and the Enterprise Goals - are described separately and not related to each other. We identify a need for combining these two aspects. If their relationship is made explicit, it can be used to enhance the way users access and interpret data in the DWH. To address this limitation, in this paper we introduce a weaving model between enterprise goals and DWH data. Thus we present a domain-specific application of model weaving to an aspect of enterprise computing. We describe metamodels for both aspects as well as the weaving links between them, which allows to show the aspects separately but also in combination. We furthermore illustrate how to use the weaving links to create business metadata. Business metadata can be used in the DWH to describe the business context and implications of the data to the users, but is usually not available in today¿s DWHs. We apply our approach to a sample situation, which is used as a running example in the paper.

Bridging the gap between data warehouses and business processes: a business intelligence perspective for event-driven process chains

Data warehouse (DWH) information is accessed by business processes, and sometimes may also initiate changes of the control flow of business process instances. Today, there are no conceptual models available that make the relationship between the DWH and the business processes transparent. In this paper, we extend the event-driven process chain, a business process modeling language, with an additional perspective to make this relationship explicit in a conceptual model. The model is tested with example business processes.

User intent behind medical queries: an evaluation of entity mapping approaches with metamap and freebase

This work focuses on understanding the user intent in the medical domain. The combination of Semantic Web and information retrieval technologies promises a better comprehension of user intents. Mapping queries to entities using Freebase is not novel, but so far only one entity per query could be identified. We overcome this limitation using annotations provided by Metamap. Also, different approaches to map queries to Freebase are explored and evaluated. We propose an indirect evaluation of the mappings, through user intent defined by classes such as Symptoms, Diseases or Treatments. Our experiments show that by using the concepts annotated by Metamap it is possible to improve the accuracy and F1 performances of mappings from queries to Freebase entities.

A Formative Evaluation of a Comprehensive Search System for Medical Professionals

Medical doctors need rapid and accurate answers, which they cannot easily find with current search systems. This paper describes a formative evaluation of a comprehensive search system for medical professionals. The study was designed to guide system development. The system features included search in text and 2D images, machine translated summaries of search results, as well as query disambiguation and suggestion features, and a comprehensive search user interface. The study design emphasizes qualitative user feedback, based on realistic simulated work tasks and data collection with spontaneous and prompted self-report, written and spoken feedback in response to questionnaires, was well as audio and video recordings, and log files. Results indicate that this is a fruitful approach to uncovering problems and eliciting requirements that would be harder to find in a component-based evaluation testing each feature separately.

A UML profile for representing business object states in a data warehouse

Data Warehouse (DWH) systems allow to analyze business objects relevant to an enterprise organization (e.g., orders or customers). Analysts are interested in the states of these business objects: A customer is either a potential customer, a first time customer, a regular customer or a past customer; purchase orders may be pending or fullfilled. Business objects and their states can be distributed over many parts of the DWH, and appear in measures, dimension attributes, levels, etc. Surprisingly, this knowledge - how business objects and their states are represented in the DWH - is not made explicit in existing conceptual models. We identify a need to make this relationship more accessible. We introduce the UML Profile for Representing Business Object States in a DWH. It makes the relationship between the business objects and the DWH conceptually visible. The UML Profile is applied to an example.

A performance measurement perspective for event-driven process chains

Business processes access data warehouse (DWH) information for performance measurement, supporting business decisions. Today, there are no conceptual models available that make the relationship between DWH architectures and business processes transparent. In this paper, we extend the event-driven process chain, a business process modeling language, with an additional perspective to make this relationship explicit in a model.