Data Warehousing for Agricultural Research - An Integrated Approach for Decision Making

Abstract

The growing need for the data warehousing technology in recent years has stemmed because of the technology's importance in supporting decision support processing and analysis. A specific property of data warehousing is to make efficient application processing for the development of decision support system, which need to summarize huge amounts of data. In this article an attempt is being made to share process and experience faced during development of agricultural data warehouse at Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute (IASRI), New Delhi (http://www.iasri.res.in) under a National Agricultural Technology Project (NATP), Mission Mode sub-project entitled "Integrated National Agricultural Resources Information System (INARIS) (http://www.inaris.gen.in). This article also provides description about broad architecture and process of agricultural data warehouse. The problems of implementation of agricultural data warehouse including dimensional modeling are different from the data warehouse developed for business process. Further, query and reporting process of this data warehouse has been briefly outlined, which may provide readers, especially research managers, the idea of flexibility and ease of operations of this on-line decision support system. An introduction about INARIS project is also given for readers.