GeoBI Architecture Based on Free Software: Experience and Review - Geographical Information Systems: Trends and Technologies - page 253

Conceptual Design
The phase of conceptual design allows the representation of data
requirements in a clear and concise manner that can be understood by the
users. In practice, very few (S)DWs are represented at the conceptual level;
instead, they are directly implemented as star or snowfl ake schemas mainly
using object-relational databases with spatial extensions. This results from
the fact that although there are several proposals for the conceptual SDW
design (e.g., Silva 2010; Damiani and Spaccapietra 2006; Glorio and Trujillo
2009; Malinowski and Zimányi 2008; Pourabbas 2003), they are not known,
except for a small group of researchers, and none of the proposals are well
accepted. We represent our conceptual schema using a MultiDim model
(Malinowski and Zimányi 2008) that allows multidimensional view of data
considering spatial and conventional data types. The resulting schema is
shown in Fig. 4.
The schema includes two foci of analysis (called fact relationships in the
model) represented by the gray diamonds: Cancer and Demographics . These
foci include measures, e.g., Births , Deaths , and Population in the Demographics
fact relationship, which allow quantitative evaluation according to different
Fig. 4. Conceptual multidimensional schema of a spatial data warehouse.