Abstract
Data Warehouses have become very popular with academics, industry, and users. The idea of a global repository for strategic information is seen as a sesame door to a world of magic, where spontaneously generated information breakthroughs turn ordinary business into a multimillionaire production activity. This is mainly due to the current focus on sophisticated OLA P functionality and on datamining techniques, which promise to lead to discovery of most precious and unexpected strategic information. While all of this may well be true, although it does not come free and the magnificence of the result is not guaranteed, there is one aspect that is underestimated or neglected. A data warehouse will not deliver anything worthwhile if it does not have the right information. Getting this information is an extremely hard and painstaking task. This presentation focuses on this aspect to explore the main issues related to data acquisition.