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The Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) is an Object Management Group (OMG) standard that provides a framework for representing metadata in data warehousing, business intelligence, knowledge management, and portal technologies.

CWM is of particular relevance to the BI Java SDK because BI applications are usually driven mainly by metadata.  We chose CWM as the uniform metamodel for the SDK, thereby grounding our architecture in a solid, standardized metadata approach. CWM is currently gaining momentum in the industry, and provides the prerequisites for modeling metadata from different implementations of OLAP and relational models. The SDK's OLAP and Relational Metadata Models are provided entirely by CWM.

The SDK also uses CWM metamodels for various other reasons:

  • CWM conforms to the MOF standard, which allows the SDK to apply JMI mappings to render a standard API for editing and navigating instances of the model.
  • CWM metamodels are capable of modeling a wide spectrum of OLAP and relational providers. They are not only generic and extensible in their overall content and structure, but are also separated from implementation considerations. This is of particular importance for the SDK, where a large variety of providers are mapped in one common metadata model.
  • CWM provides a complete relational metamodel that is based on the SQL standard. Therefore, defining a relational metadata service for accessing tabular data providers like JDBC is straightforward.