Web Analytics Data Warehouse for Information Systems: Application for Fatal Accident Reporting System

Abstract

Collecting, organizing, analyzing, and presenting data for consumption is well known for information systems. There are numerous commercial tools and vast sums of money dedicated to making this process efficient. Be it data warehousing, or map reduce framework, the core idea is to deduce useful information from disorganized and often disparate data. The objective of this thesis is to apply an organized approach to analyze public information systems so as to provide a simplified analytics interface that can help users and the public in general to make better use of the information. As one of exemplar of this approach, this thesis focuses on one specific source of publicly available data — data about fatal accidents. The methodology adopted is to apply a data warehousing approach to the fatal accident data, so as to transform the data into useful trend information. Another aspect of the methodology is to apply a commercially used approach, namely, business intelligence reporting, to serve public information in a simplified, easy to understand format. Thus, this thesis seeks to answer whether an industrial approach is applicable to public data. The work performed convincingly shows that indeed such an approach is useful. In fact, application of the data warehousing and business intelligence reporting approach results in a system which provides meaningful information of public importance. This thesis establishes the viability and simplicity of data warehousing and business intelligence reporting to help organize complex data and make them more accessible.