Towards Exploratory OLAP Over Linked Open Data – A Case Study

Abstract

Business Intelligence (BI) tools provide fundamental support for analyzing large volumes of information. Data Warehouses (DW) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools are used to store and analyze data. Nowadays more and more information is available on the Web in the form of Resource Description Framework (RDF), and BI tools have a huge potential of achieving better results by integrating real-time data from web sources into the analysis process. In this paper, we describe a framework for so-called exploratory OLAP over RDF sources. We propose a system that uses a multidimensional schema of the OLAP cube expressed in RDF vocabularies. Based on this information the system is able to query data sources, extract and aggregate data, and build a cube. We also propose a computer-aided process for discovering previously unknown data sources and building a multidimensional schema of the cube. We present a use case to demonstrate the applicability of the approach.