Ontology-Driven Conceptual Design of ETL Processes Using Graph Transformations

One of the main tasks during the early steps of a data warehouse project is the identification of the appropriate transformations and the specification of inter-schema mappings from the source to the target data stores. This is a challenging task, requiring firstly the semantic and secondly the structural reconciliation of the information provided by the available sources. This task is a part of the Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) process, which is responsible for the population of the data warehouse. In this paper, the authors propose a customizable and extensible ontology-driven approach for the conceptual design of ETL processes. A graph-based representation is used as a conceptual model for the source and target data stores.