| The potential of using data warehouses to support decision-making processes has attracted many researchers to propose various data models and methods to produce high performance data warehouse systems. It is a long and expensive process to develop a data warehouse system. The user requirements and the data warehouse design must be specified properly. To design a good data warehouse requires a solid understanding of the fundamental principles in database systems as the underlying technology that implements the data warehouse.; This thesis provides a formal foundation for data warehouse system design by identifying and formalising the main concepts of database systems related to data warehouses. The foundation consists of three main sections: a requirements specification, a formal model, and validation of web-based data warehouses. The specification is written in the Z specification language, and has been type checked using Z/EVES. Type checking guarantees the correctness of types and syntax used in the specification. Furthermore, rigorous proofs are presented to show that the specification has captured desired properties of the system correctly. |
