ABSTRACT
Billions of bytes of business-critical data are being created by organizations’ computer systems daily, yet only a small portion of them will ever be used in business-related analysis. Most companies today are “data rich” and “information poor,” as their ability to manipulate data and deliver information lags far behind the growth rate of the data. An organization’s competitiveness lies in its ability to utilize information. Data warehousing and the Internet are the two key technologies that offer potential solutions for managing corporate data. Data warehousing liberates information, and the Internet makes it easy and less costly to access information from anywhere at anytime. The combination of the two technologies makes the processing and distributing of key information more efficient and economical. The marriage of these two technologies produces Web-based data warehousing. Web-based data warehousing involves accessing, analyzing and distributing the information extracted from a data warehouse through the Internet, intranet, or extranet using a Web browser as the user interface. As a result of the explosive development in the data warehousing and Webrelated technology available today, Web-based data warehousing is starting to gain more and more popularity among organizations. It was estimated that by 2001, the Internet serves as the primary decision-support delivery platform for intra-and extra-enterprise applications (Ladley, 1998).
