Analyzing continuous fields with OLAP cubes
Leticia Gómez, Silvia Alicia Gómez, Alejandro Ariel Vaisman · 2011
Although raster data is the most popular discrete representation for continuous fields, other forms of space tessellation can be used, like Voronoi diagrams or Triangulated Irregular Networks (TIN). Besides, algebras for field manipulation have been proposed, but they are representation-dependent and not closed. To address this problems, we propose a (closed) generic map algebra over spatio-temporal continuous fields, independent of the underlying field representation. Based on this algebra, we define a language that allows analyzing continuous fields data and OLAP cubes together, using the traditional OLAP operations, providing a very general framework for spatio-temporal data analysis.