Spatial hierarchy and OLAP-favored search in spatial data warehouse

Abstract

Data warehouse and Online Analytical Processing(OLAP) play a key role in business intelligent systems. With the increasing amount of spatial data stored in business database, how to utilize these spatial information to get insight into business data from the geo-spatial point of view is becoming an important issue of data ware-house and OLAP. However, traditional data warehouse and OLAP tools can not fully exploit spatial data in coordinates because multi-dimensional spatial data does not have implicit or explicit concept hierarchy to compute pre-aggregation and materialization in data warehouse. In this paper we extend the traditional set-grouping hierarchy into multi-dimensional data space and propose to use spatial index tree as the hierarchy on spatial dimension. With spatial hierarchy, spatial data warehouse can be built accordingly. Our approach preserve the star schema in data warehouse while building the hierarchy on spatial dimension, and can be easily integrated into existing data warehouse and OLAP systems. To process spatial OLAP query in spatial data warehouse, we propose an OLAP-favored search method which can utilize the pre-aggregation result in spatial data warehouse to improve the performance of spatial OLAP queries. For generality, the algorithm is developed based on Generalized Index Searching Tree(GiST). To improve the performance of OLAP-favored search, we further introduce a heuristic search method which can provide an approximate answer to spatial OLAP query. Experiment result shows the efficiency of our method. Copyright 2003 ACM.