A Model-Driven Goal-Oriented Requirement Engineering Approach for Data Warehouses ⋆ Jose-Norberto Maz´ on, Jes´ us Pardillo, and Juan Trujillo Dept. of Software and Computing Systems University of Alicante, Spain {jnmazon,jesuspv,jtrujillo}@dlsi.ua.es Abstract. The development of a data warehouse has been tradition- ally guided by an in-depth analysis of the underlying operational data sources, thus overlooking an explicit development phase in which infor- mation requirements of decision makers are addressed. This scenario has prompted that the deployed data warehouse often fails in delivering the expected support of the decision making process. To overcome this prob- lem, we propose to use the i* modeling framework and the model driven architecture (MDA) in order to describe (i) how to model goals and in- formation requirements for data warehouses, and (ii) how to derive a conceptual multidimensional model that provides the required informa- tion to support the decision making process. 1 Introduction Data warehouse (DW) systems provide decision makers with information re- lated to a business process. This information is useful for decision makers to fulfil their goals in order to improve the business process. Both practitioners and researchers agree that the development of these systems must be based on a conceptual multidimensional (MD) model [1] that allows designers to easily structure information into facts (which contain interesting measures of a business process) and dimensions (which represent the context for analyzing the measures of a business process). Since the DW integrates several operational data sources, the development of conceptual MD models has been traditionally guided by their detailed analysis [2]. However, several studies [3,4] have pointed out that most of these conceptual MD models fail in addressing the required information as a result of a poor communication between DW developers and decision makers. Actually, information needs cannot be understood by only analyzing the opera- tional data sources, and a requirement analysis stage is needed in order to model the information requirements of decision makers and derive a suitable concep- tual MD model [5,6]. Furthermore, this stage should be based on a goal-oriented ⋆ This work has been partially supported by the METASIGN (TIN2004-00779) project and by the FPU grants AP2005-1360 and AP2006-00332 from the Spanish Min- istry of Education and Science, and by the DADS (PBC-05-012-2) project from the Castilla-La Mancha Ministry of Education and Science (Spain). J.-L. Hainaut et al. (Eds.): ER Workshops 2007, LNCS 4802, pp. 255–264, 2007. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007