Data Warehouse Seminar reports

J. Hammer (Univ. of Florida, US), M. Schneider (Univ. of Florida, US), T. Sellis (National Technical Univ. of Athens, GR)

Motivation

Research in data warehousing and online analytical processing (OLAP) has produced important technologies for the design, management and use of information systems for decision support. Much of the interest and success in this area can be attributed to the need for software and tools to improve data management and analysis given the large amounts of information that are being accumulated in corporate as well as scientific databases. However, despite the continued success and maturing of the field, much work remains to be done across many different areas of data warehousing. As more and more information is managed and stored electronically, data warehouses continue to increase in size at a staggering rate. At the same time, the data that needs to be stored in the warehouse is getting more complex in both structure and semantics while the analysis must keep up with the demands of new applications. For example, customer relationship management, analysis of spatial and spatio-temporal data, OLAP mining, mobile OLAP and more recently applications in life sciences are demanding novel representation and manipulation techniques for non-standard data, efficient algorithms to compute aggregate queries, and new, application-specific index structures.

Goal

The goal of this seminar is to bring together researchers, especially from the area of databases and information systems, to review the state-of-the-art in data warehouse technologies for OLAP, discuss recent advances and trends in the field, and identify interesting research problems. An important final outcome will be a research agenda describing opportunities and challenges for what the participants deem to be the most promising new areas in data warehousing research. The write-ups describing the topics will be jointly authored by the organizers and seminar participants and published in the form of an edited book for dissemination to the broader community.

Organization and Contents