Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 9
GeoBI Architecture Based on
Free Software: Experience and
Review
Elzbieta Malinowski
Introduction
Decision making is a process of establishing different alternatives and
choosing one that better suits the specifi c situation at hand, according to
users' knowledge and available data. For many years, different systems
(with the name of Decision Support Systems, DSSs), were developed to assist
users at different levels of management. Currently, these systems form a
part of Business Intelligence (BI) solutions (Turban et al. 2010). BI requires
current and historical data as well as adequate tools and techniques that
allow users to perform different kinds of analyses to formulate hypotheses
and to look for their confi rmation or rejection in order to solve problems
that companies or organizations are facing.
Data warehouses (DWs) play an important role in BI solutions providing
storage alternatives that facilitate the expression of complex queries required
for analysis purposes. Traditionally, DWs are implemented as relational
databases and include integrated data supplied by different internal and
external sources. Data from these sources can be integrated using extraction-
transformation-loading (ETL) tools. Later, this data can be analyzed by
taking into account a variety of tools, such as On-line Analytical Processing
(OLAP) tools that many users consider as the fi rst step for exploring DW
Department of Computer Science and Informatics, University of Costa Rica, Ciudad
Universitaria “Rodrigo Facio”, San Pedro, San José, Costa Rica.
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