EDMIS: Metadata Interchange System for OLAP

Abstract

The management of enterprise-wide information requires that metadata should be shared and globally accessible by all the heterogeneous products found in today’s information technology environment. OLAP metadata includes various information about objects and the relationships among them in an OLAP system. OLAP tools are provided by different vendors and run on different hardware and software platforms. But there still is no standard for a logical OLAP model. To use OLAP tools efficiently, users need to be able to move metadata between tools or between tools and a repository. In this paper, we have designed a metadata interchange model that can be shared among OLAP systems and have implemented a prototype called EDMIS as the OLAP metadata interchange system. The OLAP metadata interchange model that we propose in this paper is designed using XML DTDs. This model lists typical mismatches among the data models of commercial OLAP tools and proposes methods to overcome these differences. The OLAP metadata interchange system enables users to browse and search OLAP metadata on the Web. In addition, if a user wants to use the metadata in another OLAP system, the implemented system can automatically create new cubes using metadata in the repository. In order to validate the usefulness of the proposed system, we have used OLAP products such as MS SQL Server Analysis Services, Pilot DSS and Oracle Express.