A Metamodel for Manipulating Business Knowledge Within a Data Warehouse

In today's business environment, large companies struggle with a considerable number of information systems, from operational and transaction-oriented ones to analytical data processing systems, which creates an "informational chaos" from the metadata management point of view. Efficient metadata management is the key to improved performance for the data systems involved, as well as for the technical and business users who employ them. Although a multitude of data and information exists within the business intelligence systems (i.e. the data warehouse environment), business users who lack technical skills are deprived of "basic" knowledge of the data they are analysing, albeit this information lies in the technical metadata. This article presents a simple metamodel that integrates technical and business metadata, which can be used as a map for navigating through the data warehouse's metadata repository. The generic metamodel can be used as a basis for developing data warehouses or data marts, as its extended version guides them through the business metadata information and technical metadata lineage. A case study on a reinsurance data warehouse - a loss management data mart, will prove the validity and usefulness of the metamodel.