Goal-Oriented Requirement Engineering for XML Document Warehouses

Abstract

eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has emerged as the dominant standard in describing and exchanging data amongst heterogeneous data sources. The increasing presence of large volumes of data appearing creates the need to investigate XML document warehouses (XDW) as a means of handling the data for business intelligence. In our previous work (Nassis, Rajugan, Dillon, & Rahayu, 2004) we proposed a conceptual modelling approach for the development of an XDW with emphasis on the design techniques. We consider important the need of capturing data warehouse requirements early in the design stage. The elicitation of requirements and their use for data warehouse design is a significant and, as yet, an unaddressed issue. For this reason, we explore a requirement engineering (RE) approach, namely the goal-oriented approach. We will extract and extend the notion of this approach to introduce the XML document warehouse (XDW) requirement model. In order to perform this, we consider organisational objectives as well as user viewpoints. Furthermore, these are related to the XDW particularly focussing on deriving dimensions, as opposed to associating organisational objectives to the system functions, which is traditionally carried out by RE.