ANNOTATING DATA WITH MULTIDIMENSIONAL PROPERTIES
The evolution of web technologies and the data we are manipulating announce profound changes on Business Intelligence (BI) systems and open up important researches and innovations particularly in multidimensional data modeling and data integration. The emergence of the semantic Web highlights the need of including external data sources in the BI system. The semantic web came with Resource Description Framework (RDF) model to describe data over the Web by annotating resources with semantics and properties and consequently establishing reasoning mechanisms. However, integrating and/or analyzing information from Wide World Sources still a very challenging process because of their “unpredictability” and heterogeneity. Consequently, the transition to an open BI/SW system is required to handle automatic alteration on structures and enabling discovery of multidimensional entities over multiple Web sources. In this paper, we introduce our prospective approach and architecture for including external data sources in an open BI/SW system and we provide an automatic method aimed to define multidimensional entities and properties over different sources for data acquisition and data analysis requests.