Physical Design and Implementation of Spatial Data Warehouses Supporting Continuous Fields

Abstract. Although many proposals exist for extending Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with OLAP and data warehousing capabilities (a topic denoted SOLAP), only recently the importance of supporting continuous fields (i.e., phenomena that are perceived as having a value at each point in space and/or time) has been acknowledged. Examples of such phenomena include temperature, altitude, or land use. In this paper we discuss physical design issues arising when a spatial data warehouse includes a combination of spatial and non-spatial dimensions and measures, and spatio-temporal dimensions representing continuous fields. We give the syntax and semantics of the data types (and their operators) needed to support fields in SOLAP environments, and present an implementation of these types, on top of spatial-SQL. We also show how queries using the spatio-temporal operators for fields are written, parsed, and executed.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: DAWAK
• Authors: Leticia I. Gómez, Alejandro A. Vaisman, Esteban Zimányi
• Keywords: Continuous Fields, Data Warehousing Capabilities, DAWAK 2010, Geographic Information Systems, Information Technology