Master of Science, University of Akron, 2006, Computer Science

In today's world of global business, worldwide partnerships and corporate mergers, decision making plays a major role in the steady growth of a business providing it a competitive edge. Decision making is the key to smooth day-to-day operations as well as for effective future planning in this ever competitive world. Several sources of data exist in the business from which valuable information can be extracted to help make a wide range of decisions. In order to facilitate querying and analysis, the data from these sources need to be integrated. There are various considerations and approaches for such Data Integration or Information Integration and several issues surround this process. These issues are considered and the prominent approaches to Information Integration are studied with an emphasis on the Datawarehousing approach. A Datawarehouse is implemented from scratch from available raw data sources and by means of experimentation, it is shown how Datawarehousing is the most suited of all the considered approaches in specific business settings. The main objective of the research and the contribution of this thesis are towards analyzing the major issues faced in specific enterprise scenario and demonstrating how the Datawarehousing approach provides an efficient solution for them and hence provides a solid foundation for Decision Support Systems from distributed, heterogeneous data sources.

Committee: Chien-Chung Chan (Advisor) Subjects: