Evaluating and selecting web sources as external information resources of a data warehouse

摘要

A company's local data often is not sufficient to analyze market trends and make reasonable business plans. Decision making must also be based on information from suppliers, partners and competitors. Systematically integrating suitable external data from the Web into a data warehouse is a meaningful solution and will benefit the enterprise. However; the autonomy and the dynamics of the Web make the task of selecting relevant and qualified external data from the Web challenging. In this paper; we develop a set of criteria for evaluating and selecting Web resources as external data sources of a data warehouse and discuss how to screen Web data sources using Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods. The final decision with respect to selecting Web sources is sensitive to critical factors, i.e., the criterion weight and the performance score of alternatives in terms of each criterion. In this paper; we analyzed the sensitivity of the final rank of alternatives in terms of the critical factors in order to gain an insight into the stability of our final decision. The comparison of several MCDM approaches for Web source screening is also presented in the paper.