Bringing the data mart into the curriculum

ABSTRACT

The development and deployment of data warehouses have become critical activities in strategic planning and decision-making. Computer and information science students should have an early hands-on exposure to the theoretical and practical aspects of this complex technology. This paper describes the first steps in an ambitious program for bringing the data warehouse into the curriculum. With the support of a NSF-ILI grant, two teams of senior students designed and developed a large-scale data repository on an Oracle platform as part of their capstone projects. This paper reports on the early phase of that process during which students established a data mart with drill-down and advanced data visualization capabilities. The impact of the project on current and future activities in the lab and in the classroom is discussed.

REFERENCES

• 1: Daigle, R. J., Doran, Michael V., Ryder, R. M., 1999, "Changing the CIS Academic Culture: Using Senior Design Projects to Unify the Curriculum", Proceedings ISECON '99, October 1999, Chicago, IL
• 2: Doran, M. V., 1998. A cognitive-based approach to a concrete laboratory experience throughout the curriculum. National Science Foundation grant # DUE 9850752. 1998.
• 3: Katherine Hammer, Migrating data from legacy systems: challenges and solutions, Building, using, and managing the data warehouse, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997
• 4: W. H. Inmon, Building the data warehouse (2nd ed.), John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 1996
• 5: Elizabeth M. Pierce, Developing and delivering a data warehousing and mining course, Communications of the AIS, v.2 n.3es, Nov. 1999

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
data mart, data warehouse, decision support system, information science curriculum, oracle database