Graphs enriched by Cubes (GreC) : a new approach for OLAP on information networks
Wararat Jakawat · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2016
Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) is one of the most important technologies in data warehouse systems, which enables multidimensional analysis of data. It represents a very powerful and flexible analysis tool to manage within the data deeply by operating computation. OLAP has been the subject of improvements and extensions across the board with every new problem concerning domain and data; for instance, multimedia, spatial data, sequence data and etc. Basically, OLAP was introduced to analyze classical structured data. However, information networks are yet another interesting domain. Extracting knowledge inside large networks is a complex task and too big to be comprehensive. Therefore, OLAP analysis could be a good idea to look at a more compressed view. Many kinds of information networks can help users with various activities according to different domains. In this scenario, we further consider bibliographic networks formed on the bibliographic databases. This data allows analyzing not only the productions but also the collaborations between authors. There are research works and proposals that try to use OLAP technologies for information networks and it is called Graph OLAP. Many Graph OLAP techniques are based on a cube of graphs.In this thesis, we propose a new approach for Graph OLAP that is graphs enriched by cubes (GreC). In a different and complementary way, our proposal consists in enriching graphs with cubes. Indeed, the nodes or/and edges of the considered network are described by a cube. It allows interesting analyzes for the user who can navigate within a graph enriched by cubes according to different granularity levels, with dedicated operators. In addition, there are four main aspects in GreC. First, GreC takes into account the structure of network in order to do topological OLAP operations and not only classical or informational OLAP operations. Second, GreC has a global view of a network considered with multidimensional information. Third, the slowly changing dimension problem is taken into account in order to explore a network. Lastly, GreC allows data analysis for the evolution of a network because our approach allows observing the evolution through the time dimensions in the cubes.To evaluate GreC, we implemented our approach and performed an experimental study on a real bibliographic dataset to show the interest of our proposal. GreC approach includes different algorithms. Therefore, we also validated the relevance and the performances of our algorithms experimentally.