An XML-Centered Warehouse to Manage Information of the Fruit Supply Chain
Renato Fileto, Carlos Alberto Alves Meira, Juaquim Naka, Álvaro Seixas Neto, Cláudia Bauzer Medeiros · World Congress of Computers in Agriculture and Natural Resources, Proceedings of the 2002 Conference · 2013
Interoperability among information systems is a very difficult goal because of thedifferent technologies and application domain concepts employed to develop thesesystems. The construction of a data warehouse may be the first step in order toachieve some data integration. It involves migration of data in one direction: from thedata sources to the warehouse and from there to the data analysis tools. In thisprocess, data need to be understood and put into a uniform representation.Nowadays, XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is beginning to be widely employedas a standard for data representation and exchange in the Internet. It provides auniform syntax to represent data and their structure. The use of XML as anintermediate representation level can lend versatility and openness to a datawarehouse. If consensual semantics are associated to XML data and their markup,the activities involved in the data integration process can be simplified anddistributed. The sources can export data to the warehouse in a format suitable fordata integration. The warehouse can then supply a variety of views from theintegrated data, according to the peculiarities of each data analysis tool.This paper presents an application of these ideas in the development of a decisionsupport system for the Brazilian fruit supply chain. The main goals of the project arethe construction of a data warehouse and the development of adequate proceduresand methodologies to manage data in this domain. The latter results will be useful forfuture achievement of interoperability in a wider sense, i.e., the interchange of detailedinformation among the several chains agents for their harmonic functioning.