Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6
On Modeling and Analysis
of Multidimensional
Geographic Databases
Sandro Bimonte
LIRIS (Laboratoire d'InfoRmatique en Images et Systèmes d'information), France
ABSTRACT
Data warehouse and OLAP systems are tools to support decision-making. Geographic information
systems (GISs) allow memorizing, analyzing and visualizing geographic data. In order to exploit the
complex nature of geographic data, a new kind of decision support system has been developed: spatial
OLAP (SOLAP). Spatial OLAP redefines main OLAP concepts: dimension, measure and multidimen-
sional operators. SOLAP systems integrate OLAP and GIS functionalities into a unique interactive and
flexible framework. Several research tools have been proposed to explore and the analyze spatio-multi-
dimensional databases. This chapter presents a panorama of SOLAP models and an analytical review
of research SOLAP tools. Moreover, the authors describe their Web-based system: GeWOlap. GeWOlap
is an OLAP-GIS integrated solution implementing drill and cut spatio-multidimensional operators, and
it supports some new spatio-multidimensional operators which change dynamically the structure of the
spatial hypercube thanks to spatial analysis operators.
INTRODUCTION
results of analyses are the basis of strategic busi-
ness decisions.
It has been estimated that about 80% of data
in databases contains geo-referenced information
(Franklin, 1992). Geographic Information Systems
(GISs) allow memorizing, analyzing and visualizing
geographic data.
OLAP systems reduce geographic data to simple
textual data. Therefore, they do not present any car-
A Data Warehouse is a centralized repository of data
acquired from external data sources and organized
following a multidimensional model (Inmon, 1996)
in order to be analyzed by On-Line Analytical Pro-
cessing (OLAP) applications. OLAP tools provide
the ability to interactively explore multidimensional
data presenting detailed and aggregated data. The
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