Using Ontologies for the Design of Data Warehouses

Obtaining an implementation of a data warehouse is a complex task that forces designers to acquire wide knowledge of the domain, thus requiring a high level of expertise and becoming it a prone-to-fail task. Based on the authors' experience, they have detected a set of situations they have faced up with in real-world projects in which they believe that the use of ontologies will improve several aspects of the design of data warehouses. The aim of this paper is to describe several shortcomings of current data warehouse design approaches and discuss the benefit of using ontologies to overcome them.