A practical application of our MDD approach for modeling secure XML data warehouses

摘要

Data warehouses are systems that provide useful information to support the decision making process, thus improving organizations' business processes. These systems integrate heterogeneous sources which are not only limited to their internal business data but also include data from the Web, the latter of which have become increasingly more important in the decision making process in recent years. This has motivated the extensive use of XML in the implementation of data warehouses, in a manner which facilitates data and metadata interchange among the heterogeneous data sources from the Web and the data warehouse. However, the business information that data warehouses manage is crucial and highly sensitive, and must be carefully protected. Security is thus a key issue in the design of data warehouses, regardless of the implementation technology used. It is important to note that the data available on the Web requires particular security considerations which have been specifically tailored to these systems in order to permit their particularities to be captured correctly. Unfortunately, although security issues have been considered in the development of traditional data warehouses, current research lacks approaches with which to consider security when the target platform is based on XML technology.