GeoBI Architecture Based on Free Software: Experience and Review - Geographical Information Systems: Trends and Technologies - page 266

for the MDX query related to the Cancer cube is shown in Fig. 12. 1 Users
familiar with MDX may use the editor to modify the query for displaying
data (the low part Fig. 12) or choose components (the left part of Fig. 12) that
automatically create a new MDX query and present results on the screen. In
this way non-expert users can perform different operations without being
aware of the implementation details.
However, even though there is a variety of free software for conventional
OLAP data visualization and manipulation, the situation is different when
the spatial component is added. When our project initiated, the available
free solutions allow the typical OLAP operations, e.g., drill-down, roll-up,
pivot, to be performed over conventional data, lacking synchronization
with and manipulation over maps. Looking for some solutions to start with,
the software called GeoOLAP from Camptocamp (Camptocamp 2012) was
available to provide some basic SOLAP operations in managing spatial
dimensions and conventional measures and offered three environments
for displaying results: tables, graphs, and maps.

Fig. 12. OLAP client (STPivot from StrateBI) representing results and MDX query.

Color image of this figure appears in the color plate section at the end of the topic.

1

The names in the screenshot do not correspond to cube defi nition in this chapter, since we
translate them from Spanish in order to make XML and MDX codes more understandable.