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This article describes the Decision Support System (DSS) for Academic Information being developed at Instituto Superior Técnico, the Engineering School of the Technical University of Lisbon. In Portuguese, this project has been given the acronym SADIA (Sistema de Apoio à Decisão da Informação Académica).

This paper focuses on the early phases of the DSS development process, ie, the business requirements definition and the dimensional modelling. First, we show how the business requirements of the School drive the definition of the DSS dimensional model. Second, we detail the logical dimensional model for a selected business process, the IST Student Admission process. Third, the corresponding physical design decisions are reported. The results obtained from the three phases were successfully validated by business users.