Data Warehouse (DWH) systems allow to analyze business objects relevant to an enterprise organization (e.g., orders or customers).
Analysts are interested in the states of these business objects: A customer is either a potential customer, a first time customer,
a regular customer or a past customer; purchase orders may be pending or fullfilled.
Business objects and their states can be distributed over many parts of the DWH, and appear in measures, dimension attributes,
levels, etc.
Surprisingly, this knowledge – how business objects and their states are represented in the DWH – is not made explicit in
existing conceptual models. We identify a need to make this relationship more accessible.
We introduce the UML Profile for Representing Business Object States in a DWH. It makes the relationship between the business objects and the DWH conceptually visible. The UML Profile is applied to an
example.
This research has been funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science, and Culture, and the European Social
Fund (ESF) under grant 31.963/46-VII/9/2002.