The concept of document warehousing for multi-dimensional modeling of textual-based business intelligence

During the past decade, data warehousing has been widely adopted in the business community. It provides multi-dimensional analyses on cumulated historical business data for helping contemporary administrative decision-making. Nevertheless, it is believed that only about 20% information can be extracted from data warehouses concerning numeric data only, the other 80% information is hidden in non-numeric data or even in documents. Therefore, many researchers now advocate that it is time to conduct research work on document warehousing to capture complete business intelligence. Document warehouses, unlike traditional document management systems, include extensive semantic information about documents, cross-document feature relations, and document grouping or clustering to provide a more accurate and more efficient access to text-oriented business intelligence. In this paper, we discuss the basic concept of document warehousing and present its formal definitions. Then, we propose a general system framework and elaborate some useful applications to illustrate the importance of document warehousing. The work is essential for establishing an infrastructure to help combine text processing with numeric OLAP processing technologies. The combination of data warehousing and document warehousing will be one of the most important kernels of knowledge management and customer relationship management applications.