  In a data warehousing process, mastering the data preparation phase allows
substantial gains in terms of time and performance when performing
multidimensional analysis or using data mining algorithms. Furthermore, a data
warehouse can require external data. The web is a prevalent data source in this
context. In this paper, we propose a modeling process for integrating diverse
and heterogeneous (so-called multiform) data into a unified format.
Furthermore, the very schema definition provides first-rate metadata in our
data warehousing context. At the conceptual level, a complex object is
represented in UML. Our logical model is an XML schema that can be described
with a DTD or the XML-Schema language. Eventually, we have designed a Java
prototype that transforms our multiform input data into XML documents
representing our physical model. Then, the XML documents we obtain are mapped
into a relational database we view as an ODS (Operational Data Storage), whose
content will have to be re-modeled in a multidimensional way to allow its
storage in a star schema-based warehouse and, later, its analysis.
