
These entities of the knowledge base also have their 
properties assigned. While the properties used can 
differ from concept to concept, generally they all 
include a name and description property. Following 
the previous example, the property “description” of 
the measure contains a general description of this 
measure allowing other actors to better understand 
its meaning. Furthermore, the property “literature” 
of a measure can contain bibliographic content 
pointing to literature with comprising and detailed 
definition of the measure. If a measure is derived 
from other measures, the property calculation rule 
contains the rule by which this measure is derived 
from others. Beyond that, the source property of a 
measure provides information about the source 
systems from which a specific measure can be 
obtained. 
The concepts cube and measure instance 
depicted in the MD requirements meta model (figure 
3) are relevant for representing specific information 
needs contained in the MD requirements models. 
The MD requirements models each link to a specific 
part of the knowledge base according to the specific 
information needs they represent. While the 
knowledge base comprises the general knowledge 
about multidimensional business problems within 
different business domains, the specific information 
needs of business professionals constitute a partition 
of the whole knowledge base. By determining the 
information needs, measures are instantiated with 
specific dimensions and levels. As for example the 
measure “actual working time” has the potential 
dimension levels “minute”, “hour”, “day” up to 
“year” stored in the knowledge base, a specific 
information need comprises relevant dimension 
levels on a more aggregated level from “day” up to 
“year” neglecting the more granular levels. To allow 
this the measure instance concept links between the 
general measure and a specific dimension level at 
which it is measured. 
4.3  Core Functions 
The system offers three core functions providing the 
interaction of the actors with the system: the 
management of the knowledge base, the selection of 
requirement specific measures and the generation of 
a platform independent model from the knowledge 
base and the specific requirements. 
The management component allows domain 
experts to access the knowledge base and to create, 
edit and delete respective entities. The domain 
experts are able to define functions, measures, 
dimensions and dimension levels and to specify the 
respective properties such as name, description, 
calculation rule, literature source etc. 
Based on the knowledge stored in the knowledge 
base, business professionals can select measures, 
dimensions and dimension levels to define and 
formulate their multidimensional business problem, 
resulting the specific MD requirements models The 
process of formulating multidimensional business 
problems is facilitated by selecting relevant 
measures and determining the needed level and 
hence the business professional creates the MD 
requirements model, which can be seen as a CIM 
according to the MDA introduced in chapter 2.1.  
Based on the MD requirements model and 
further information available in the knowledge base, 
a multidimensional platform independent model 
(MD PIM) based on ADAPTed UML (Priebe and 
Pernul, 2001) is generated. This model can then be 
used by IT professionals for further development of 
the DW. 
4.4  Implementation Detail 
The system architecture described is realized as a 
web application created using Java technologies. In 
the prototype the raw data managed in the repository 
is saved in a graph database Neo4j (Neo Technology 
inc., www. neo4j.org/) since the interconnected 
concepts in the domain and requirements model 
suggest that form of storage. Furthermore Neo4j 
offers a simple and clearly defined API, allowing the 
wrapping of nodes directly to java objects. The 
different components of the system can then work 
on those objects without having any knowledge of 
the underlying persistence layer. The inference 
mechanisms needed by the selection and generation 
components are achieved by extending the java 
objects, i.e. adding new methods that will support 
the inference based on the underlying graph nodes 
and relations. For example the measure instance 
“actual working time” gathered at the level “day” is 
also available at all aggregated levels such as 
“week”, “month” and “year” which are inferred by 
the method. In the database the node representing 
the measure instance “actual working time” 
specified at the level “day” is only connected to the 
node of the dimension level “day”. By traversing the 
graph the system can then infer the other dimension 
levels available for the measure. 
The representation on the client side is achieved 
by different dynamic pages. They allow users to 
access the management functionality of the 
knowledge base as well as the selection and 
generation component. 
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