Nowadays, it is widely accepted that the data warehouse design task should be largely automated. Furthermore, the data warehouseconceptual schema must be structured according to the multidimensional model and as a consequence, the most common way to automatically look for subjects and dimensions of analysis is by discoveringfunctional dependencies (as dimensions functionally depend on the fact) over the data sources. Most advanced methodsfor automating the design of the data warehouse carry out this processfrom relational OLTP systems, assuming that a RDBMS is the most common kind of data source we may find, and taking as startingpoint a relational schema. In contrast, in our approach we propose to rely instead on a conceptual representation of the domainof interest formalized through a domain ontology expressed in the DL-Lite Description Logic. We propose an algorithm to discover functional dependencies from the domain ontology that exploits the inference capabilities of DL-Lite, thus fully taking into account the semantics of the domain. We also provide an evaluation of our approachin a real-world scenario.

Peer Reviewed