On Modeling and Analysis of Multidimensional Geographic Databases

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 multidimensional 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-multidimensional 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.