Source integration in data warehousing

Source integration is one of the core problems in data warehousing. Two critical factors for the design and maintenance of applications requiring source integration, and in particular data warehouse applications, are conceptual modeling of the domain, and reasoning support over the conceptual representation. We present a novel approach to conceptual modeling for source integration, which allows for suitably modeling the global concepts of the application, the individual information sources, and the constraints among different sources. Our methodological framework relies on the reasoning services associated with the modeling formalism to support an incremental source integration phase within the data warehouse design process