ABSTRACT
Over the past several years, the data warehouse has evolved into a necessary foundation for the successful trend of decision-support system (DSS) development environments. This chapter begins with an examination of the driving forces of data warehousing, mainly from a business-oriented perspective, as well as a brief review of the historical development of data warehousing. The basic components of data warehousing are then described. A discussion on the Web-enabled data warehouse, or Webhouse, leads to a review of agent-based artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, as well as the notions of ontology and semantic Webs. Intelligent data analysis in the data warehousing environment, including data mining, Web mining, and clickstream analysis, is also examined.
