Integration of geographical information in OLAP systems
João Moura Pires (superv.), Universidade Nova de Lisboa, July 2006.
Abstract: Location is an issue of political, strategic and economic importance. In organizations the mobility of people, goods and services has contributed for the accumulation of data related to space (spatial data). The analysis of these volumes of data can contribute to identify and to understand trends or to discover exceptions. Spatial data has a specific and complex nature and it is stored using data types like alphanumeric (text, numbers, date), vectors (geometric) or images. On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) systems intend to assist its users to explore great amounts of alphanumeric data in a rapid and interactive way, no meanwhile, that kind of systems are not prepared to deal with data types like vectors or images due to its complexity. In that kind of systems the rapid and interactive way of exploring information is enabled by getting summarized data from a data repository modeled with the multidimensional data model and by operations that generalize, detail or observe data using different perspectives. OLAP systems that manipulate spatial data are designated Spatial On-Line Analytical Processing (SOLAP) systems and although there exits some implementations there isn’t a solution that gets all the potentialities of exploring data related to space. The present work presents a SOLAP solution whose data repository is on an Object/Relational Database Management System (ORDBMS), with a spatial package, in order to enable storage and navigation thought spatial data. In the scope of this work we develop a prototype for exploring the emission of pollutants in Portuguese industrial installations.