Data warehouse technology has been successfully integrated into the information infrastructure of major organizations as potential solution for eliminating redundancy and providing for comprehensive data integration. Realizing the importance of a data warehouse as the main data repository within an organization, this dissertation addresses different aspects related to the data warehouse architecture and performance issues. Many data warehouse architectures have been presented by industry analysts and research organizations. These architectures vary from the independent and physical business unit centric data marts to the centralised two-tier hub-and-spoke data warehouse. The operational data store is a third tier which was offered later to address the business requirements for inter-day data loading. While the industry-available architectures are all valid, I found them to be suboptimal in efficiency (cost) and effectiveness (productivity). In this dissertation, I am advocating a new architecture (The Hybrid Architecture) which encompasses the industry advocated architecture. The hybrid architecture demands the acquisition, loading and consolidation of enterprise atomic and detailed data into a single integrated enterprise data store (The Enterprise Data Warehouse) where businessunit centric Data Marts and Operational Data Stores (ODS) are built in the same instance of the Enterprise Data Warehouse. For the purpose of highlighting the role of data warehouses for different applications, we describe an effort to develop a data warehouse for a geographical information system (GIS). We further study the importance of data practices, quality and governance for financial institutions by commenting on the RBC Financial Group case. v The development and deployment of the Enterprise Data Warehouse based on the Hybrid Architecture spawned its own issues and challenges. Organic data growth and business requirements to load additional new data significantly will increase the amount of stored data. Consequently, the number of users will increase significantly. Enterprise data warehouse obesity, performance degradation and navigation difficulties are chief amongst the issues and challenges. Association rules mining and social networks have been adopted in this thesis to address the above mentioned issues and challenges. We describe an approach that uses frequent pattern mining and social network techniques to discover different communities within the data warehouse. These communities include sets of tables frequently accessed together, sets of tables retrieved together most of the time and sets of attributes that mostly appear together in the queries. We concentrate on tables in the discussion; however, the model is general enough to discover other communities. We first build a frequent pattern mining model by considering each query as a transaction and the tables as items. Then, we mine closed frequent itemsets of tables; these itemsets include tables that are mostly accessed together and hence should be treated as one unit in storage and retrieval for better overall performance. We utilize social network construction and analysis to find maximum-sized sets of related tables; this is a more robust approach as opposed to a union of overlapping itemsets. We derive the Jaccard distance between the closed itemsets and construct the social network of tables by adding links that represent distance above a given threshold. The constructed network is analyzed to discover communities of tables that are mostly accessed together. The reported test results are promising and demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the developed approach.

Une recherche qualitative à partir de l’étude d’un cas de groupe retrace le travail clinique tel qu’il est « en train de se faire » dans un dispositif de musicothérapie analytique de groupe, sur le terrain « ordinaire » d’un hôpital de jour accueillant des sujets adultes souffrant de troubles psychiatriques invalidants. Plusieurs voix, psychanalytiques, musicologiques et philosophiques, offrent une trame conceptuelle pour interroger la rencontre et le jeu avec les sons au sein du groupe, et la façon dont le jeu contribue à restaurer les processus de symbolisation primaire particulièrement empêchés pour les sujets que nous accueillons. Dans le cadre-dispositif ouvrant des potentialités de transferts multidirectionnels et d’associativité dans une pluralité de langage, les éléments relevés dans l’observation du cheminement clinique du groupe sont le support d’un modèle d’évaluation, au sens d’extraire de la valeur, du jeu symbolisant. De la matérialité sonore et musicale, appel à la sensori-affectivo-motricité, jusqu’aux sens potentiels de la mise en mots se déploie le cheminement mouvant de mise en forme et en scène du groupe, des sujets dans les liens de groupe. Ce cheminement ouvre sur la construction de la réflexivité psychique au cœur des processus de symbolisation et d’appropriation subjective de l’expérience, expérience restée jusque-là impensable, infigurable, irreprésentable. / A qualitative research from the study of a group case retraces clinical work as it « is being done » in a plan of analytic group music therapy, on the « ordinary » ground of a day-hospital that treats adult subjects suffering from invalidating psychiatric troubles. Several voices, be they psychoanalytical, musicological, or philosophical, offer a conceptual framework with which to interrogate the encounter and the play with sounds within the group, and the way in which this play contributes to the restoration of the primary symbolisation processes that are particularly impaired for the subjects we treat. In the framework that opens a potential for multidirectional transfers and for associativity in a plurality of language, the elements gathered while observing the group’s clinical thought processes are the basis of a model of evaluation, in the sense of value extraction and of symbolisation play. From the materiality of music and sound, which calls to senso-affectivo-motricity, to the potential senses of wording, a moving process of shaping and staging develops within the group and the subjects that form the group. This process opens up on the building of the psychic reflexivity that lies at the heart of symbolisation processes and of processes through which the subjects seize experience, the latter having hitherto remained unthinkable, unfigurable and unrepresentable.

Il presente lavoro nasce dall’interesse ad approfondire il tema della formazione e in particolare della sua valutazione e della sua efficacia. La prima parte consiste nell’esplorazione della letteratura: il primo capitolo si focalizza sulla valutazione considerando sia la valutazione nelle scienze sociali, sia la valutazione della formazione (es. evoluzione, questioni centrali); il secondo è dedicato all’approfondimento della training effectiveness (strettamente connessa, ma distinta della training evaluation) e nel terzo capitolo vengono presentati diversi aspetti del corso di formazione (es. approccio, caratteristiche, dispositivi di formazione e valutazione, evoluzione) oggetto dello studio di caso: un percorso formativo complesso che coinvolge la trasformazione di aspetti dell’identità professionale, rivolto ad allenatori di calcio di settore giovanile. Nella seconda parte vengono presentati i tre studi empirici. Il primo è finalizzato ad esplorare, da diversi punti di vista, gli esiti della formazione (focalizzandosi in particolare sull’evoluzione delle rappresentazioni) e quali elementi della proposta formativa sono stati di sostegno alla generazione di tali esiti. Nel secondo studio viene presentata l’esplorazione qualitativa finalizzata ad approfondire, da diverse prospettive, se e come il gruppo di formazione (proposto come principale strumento di formazione) possa essere un elemento a sostegno dell’efficacia formativa. Infine il terzo studio ha l’obiettivo di rileggere la training effectiveness attraverso la fase valutativa di follow-up, indagando in particolare tre oggetti: le traiettorie di cambiamento dei soggetti, il contributo del dispositivo valutativo e la spendibilità dello strumento semi-proiettivo DSSVP. Il capitolo conclusivo è dedicato alla lettura trasversale degli studi, alle riflessioni conclusive sul contributo del lavoro al costrutto di training effectiveness e ai rilanci per l’azione. / This work was born from the interest to deepen the training issue and particularly its evaluation and its effectiveness. The first part consists of the literature analysis: the first chapter is focused on the evaluation considering both the evaluation in the social sciences and the training evaluation (e.g. evolution, crucial issues); the second is aimed to deepen the training effectiveness (strictly connected, but different from the training evaluation) and the third chapter is dedicated to different aspects of the course (e.g. approach, characteristics, training and evaluation methods) that is object of the case-study: a complex educational program involving the change in professional identity aspects, aimed to youth sector’s soccer coaches. The second part consists of three qualitative studies. The first is aimed to explore, from different points of view, the training outcomes (the focus is particularly on the representations’ change) and which aspects of the educational proposal have been a support to reach these outcomes. The second study presents the qualitative research aimed to investigate, from different perspectives, if and how the training-group (proposed as privileged tool) can contribute to the training effectiveness. The last study is aimed to explore the training effectiveness through the follow-up evaluation phase investigating specifically three objects: the change trajectories of subjects who have attended the formative path and the contribute both of the evaluation method and system and of the semi-projective tool DSSVP. The last chapter is dedicated to the conclusive remarks (both about the three studied considered together and about the contribute of the research to the training effectiveness construct) and to further development.