Global Positioning System Reference
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at the server level allowing their analysis, visualization, and manipulation
at the front-end level. These SOLAP system development phases may look
easy to achieve. However, based on our experience in the development of
a GeoBI solution with a SDW and SOLAP using free software, there is still
many challenges that must be overcome.
Research related to SDWs and SOLAP has more than 15 years of tradition
and many interesting and valuable proposals were developed showing the
possible directions that these systems could take. The solutions cover a wide
range of topics, e.g., SDW or SOLAP design concepts and methods, queries,
performance, indexing, and implementation, to mention a few. However,
many times these solutions are presented as research papers or prototypes
without the possibility to be used by the wider public. Furthermore, the
separation of content and presentation is not always clear (Dubé et al. 2009)
and the front-end layer is in charge to hide the complexity of the system
and the fact that two separate underlying systems are used, i.e., OLAP and
GIS. In addition, concepts developed by researchers are seldom included
in free SOLAP products, e.g., spatial measures, different types of spatial
hierarchies, and spatial aggregation functions, among others. In particular,
it is diffi cult to satisfy the requirement of having freely-available SOLAP
server and front-end software that rely on an open architecture. To the best
of our knowledge, the GeoMondrian server (Spatialytics 2013b) is currently
an option for including spatial dimensions in the SOLAP schema. However,
there are still limitations that this software must overcome in order to allow
users to exploit OLAP features to their full capabilities. The situation gets
more complicated when searching for free SOLAP front-end solutions based
on GeoMondrian server. There is a very limited number of options and they
require good technical skills in order to make them functional.
We believe, as stated by Devillers et al. (2010) and Goodchild (2008), that
even though a number of research projects led to methods and tools used
by the nonacademic community, a large body of scientific knowledge is still
only in the hands of researchers and embedded in scientific publications, like
the one related to SDWs and SOLAP. Combining research efforts, using open
architectures, and improving existing solutions based on research proposals
will not only benefi t a research community but also deliver solutions to non-
expert users that may help them make informed decision based on spatial
and conventional data analysis. In this chapter, we mentioned several issues
that the research community and practitioners should face. Furthermore,
some additional evaluations of SOLAP solutions—such as the one made
for conventional BI (Golfarelli 2009; Thomsen and Pedersen 2008)—could
help better evaluate the current situation. In addition, the research should
consider that SDW/SOLAP solutions are not replacing existing GIS tools;
on the contrary, not only do both environments have relatively distinct
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