Warehousing the Dental Materials Data: A Prototype
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0894-LL09-06.1
Warehousing the Dental Materials Data: A Prototype
Yong Li Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697 Email: [email protected]
ABSTRACT This paper presents a preliminary investigation on the effectiveness of the new data management technique of data warehousing in organizing dental materials data in order to provide the efficient information services such as data retrieval and materials selection. A scaled-down version of the data warehouse for dental materials is constructed and an English Query application, which allows the end users to formulate their queries in natural English language, is developed on top of the data warehouse. The data warehouse supports five types of queries from basic practice of data retrieval to more advanced information service of materials selection. The results have demonstrated that the data warehousing technique is of a great potential in storing, processing and managing dental materials data. INTRODUCTION Dental materials and their selection play a significant role in restorative dentistry [1-5]. The selection task may become increasingly challenging due to the proliferation in dental products, techniques and information. It has been noted [6,7], that an effective selection can only be achieved after taking into account a number of factors including (1) physical and mechanical properties of the material; (2) technical features of the material from the perspective of the dental professional; (3) patient factors of acceptability and cost; and (4) other clinical aspects that contribute to the material's effectiveness. It is evident that the selection of dental materials can be a sophisticated decision-making process that involves a large amount of information. It is therefore highly desirable to have an efficient information management system in place assisting dental professionals to make a better-informed decision in their course of seeking an optimal solution for materials. In this regard, the new IT technique of data warehousing is in a unique position to respond such a need. As an emerging data management technology, the data warehousing [8] has shown the unprecedented capability of integrating all of the information in a specific application domain under the same umbrella of a data warehouse. A well-structured data warehouse can provide a wide spectrum of information services including the support of decision-making activities. In a recent paper [9], we have elaborated the importance and architecture of a materials data warehouse that supports materials selection in mechanical design. It can be anticipated that a well-constructed materials data warehouse can suitably serve as the central repository of materials properties to provide a broad range of informational services from data sharing, retrieval and dissemination, to a variety of analytical operations including materials selection.
0894-LL09-06.2
In this paper, we conduct a prototyping investigation on building a scaled-down data warehouse (
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