Abstract Generic Dimension - Help Needed

What does the business need to know about a contract?

One mistake that is too easy to make is to over-engineer things. Attributes that seem important turn out to be of no importance to analytics.

What would be wrong with a flat contract dimension with sparsely populated attributes?

or use super/subtype dimensions where only the common attributes sit in the supertype dimension

ngalemmo wrote:What does the business need to know about a contract?

One mistake that is too easy to make is to over-engineer things.  Attributes that seem important turn out to be of no importance to analytics.  

What would be wrong with a flat contract dimension with sparsely populated attributes?  

Each specific attribute is necessary because our areas have some different attributes for their contracts (The product contracts are controlled by different areas).
We want a flat contract dimension with sparsely populated attributes, that’s an usual approach?  We don’t have any dimension with so sparse populated attributes today.
Our main concern is about the business user reaction with blank or ‘Not Applicable’ attributes, that’s why we want to control the user view by a semantic layer.
Do you think this is the best solution?

My suggestion is not to create a super/subtype dimension but to create a flat abstract dim with all of the attributes from all sources. Common attribute like contract_name is going to be the same for all the source, but unique attributes per source can be named differently. You can have "source name" column to identify a specific contract source in the dim. Using that source name you can hide  ‘Not Applicable’ attributes in the view. BTW You need a View if you have educated super user who can drag and drop attributes from a dim to create their own report. If you have canned reports, then you do not need different views, you need different report per a source... just show specific attributes in the report according to a user from a specific source.