Chapter 5. The Conceptual Model

This chapter focuses on the conceptual modeling part of our data warehouse solution. We intend to adhere to the definition of the conceptual model as one that specifies the information requirements. For a data warehouse design that uses our general conceptual model (GCM; see Chapter 3), we need to be able to provide the following components:

• Customer-centric diagram

• Customer's changing and nonchanging circumstances

• Customer behavior

• Derived segments

In the previous chapter we explored, in some detail, the issues surrounding the representation of time, and so our conceptual model needs to be able to capture the temporal requirements of each data element. We also looked at the causal changes and the dependencies within the data items that we need to capture.