Toward a Natural Language-Based Approach for the Specification of Decisional-Users Requirements

Abstract

The number of organizations adopting the Data Warehouse (DW) technology along with data analytics in order to improve the effectiveness of their decision–making processes is permanently increasing. Despite the efforts invested, the DW design remains a great challenge research domain. More accurately, the design quality of the DW depends on several aspects; among them, the requirement-gathering phase is a critical and complex task. In this context, we propose a Natural language (NL) NL-template based design approach, which is twofold; firstly, it facilitates the involvement of decision-makers in the early step of the DW design; indeed, using NL is a good and natural means to encourage the decision-makers to express their requirements as query-like English sentences. Secondly, our approach aims to generate a DW multidimensional schema from a set of gathered requirements (as OLAP: On-Line-Analytical-Processing queries, written according to the NL suggested templates). This approach articulates around: (i) two NL-templates for specifying multidimensional components, and (ii) a set of five heuristic rules for extracting the multidimensional concepts from requirements. Really, we are developing a software prototype that accepts the decision-makers' requirements then automatically identifies the multidimensional components of the DW model.