Structuring the Unstructured: How to Dimensionalize Semi-Structured Business Data

The Business Intelligence industry is paying more and more attention to the ever-growing heap of unstructured and semi-structured business data. However, the price of structuring this data for the purposes of performing business analysis is quite steep. The focus of this paper is a fact-driven approach for converting semi-structured business spreadsheets into well-structured multidimensional models ready to be analyzed by any Business Intelligence system. This paper focuses on one specific part of business content - the semi-structured worksheets typically originating from collaboration, planning, reporting and other internal and external business processes.