Quality metrics for conceptual models for data warehouse focusing on dimension hierarchies

Abstract

Multidimensional conceptual models have been accepted as the foundation for data warehouse designs. The quality of these models have significant effect on the quality of data warehouse and hence, in turn on the information quality. Few researchers have defined quality attributes for the conceptual models for data warehouse and have also proposed metrics to assess the quality attributes of these models objectively. The objective of this work is to propose candidate metrics to compute the structural complexity of multidimensional model. The main emphasis of this paper will be on the dimension hierarchies in multidimensional model. Though, these hierarchies play very significant role in analysing data at various granularity levels, their use enhances structural complexities of multidimensional model which can affect their understandability and modifiability and in turn maintainability.