A Metadata Oriented Architecture for Building Datawarehouse

A metadata-oriented data warehouse architecture that consists of seven components: legacy system, extracting software, operational data store, data warehouse, data mart, application, and metadata is proposed for better understanding of the architecture.

Abstract

Data warehouse is an intelligent store of data that can aggregate vast amounts of information. A metadata is critical for implementing data warehouse. Therefore, integrating data warehouse with its metadata offers a new opportunity to create a more adaptive information system. This paper proposes a metadata-oriented data warehouse architecture that consists of seven components: legacy system, extracting software, operational data store, data warehouse, data mart, application, and metadata. A taxonomy for dataflow and metaflow is proposed for better understanding of the architecture. In addition, a metadata schema is built within the framework of the seven components. The architecture with its metadata component is applied to a real-life data warehouse for a large medical center in order to illustrate its practical usefulness.