Data warehouse systems are nowadays a well known and widely
spread approach for supporting management decisions. In several
companies or even across companies the idea of integrating several
data warehouses into a virtual or federated data warehouse is of
growing interest. But the technical and semantic problems are very
demanding. An essential part for solving this problem is a
standardized, vendor independent format for describing
multidimensional data. This paper introduces XCube, a family of
XML based document templates to exchange data warehouse data,
i.e. data cubes, over any kind of network. XCube is organized in a
modular fashion, so the multidimensional schema, the descriptions
of the single dimensions and the fact data itself can be transmitted
in separate steps. In addition to the describing formats XCube also
offers two kinds of dynamic document types that can be used to
explore the (multidimensional) content of another warehouse in a
vendor independent way. They are primarily meant to reduce the
amount of data transferred over the network