A Novel Query-Based Approach for Addressing Summarizability Issues in XOLAP

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new query-based method for automatically detecting and resolving summarizability issues in XML-based multidimensional data models, improving accuracy and scalability in complex hierarchical data analysis.

Contribution

It presents a novel query-time approach that handles summarizability problems in XML MD models without altering data or models, unlike previous methods.

Findings

Effective detection and processing of summarizability issues at query time.

Focus on XML models better suited for complex hierarchies.

Scales better than existing reference approaches.

Abstract

The business intelligence and decision-support systems used in many application domains casually rely on data warehouses, which are decision-oriented data repositories modeled as multidimensional (MD) structures. MD structures help navigate data through hierarchical levels of detail. In many real-world situations, hierarchies in MD models are complex, which causes data aggregation issues, collectively known as the summarizability problem. This problem leads to incorrect analyses and critically affects decision making. To enforce summarizability, existing approaches alter either MD models or data, and must be applied a priori, on a case-by-case basis, by an expert. To alter neither models nor data, a few query-time approaches have been proposed recently, but they only detect summarizability issues without solving them. Thus, we propose in this paper a novel approach that automatically detects and processes summarizability issues at query time, without requiring any particular expertise from the user. Moreover, while most existing approaches are based on the relational model, our approach focus on an XML MD model, since XML data is customarily used to represent business data and its format better copes with complex hierarchies than the relational model. Finally, our experiments show that our method is likely to scale better than a reference approach for addressing the summarizability problem in the MD context.