A MULTIDIMENSIONAL APPROACH TO THE REPRESENTATION OF THE SPATIO-TEMPORAL MULTI-GRANULARITY
Concepción M. Gascueña, Dolores Cuadra, Paloma Martı́nez · 2006
Many efforts have been devoted to the treatment of spatial data in databases both in traditional database systems and decision support systems or On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) technologies in datawarehouses (DW). Nevertheless, many open questions concerning this kind of data still remain. The work presented in this paper is focused on dealing with the spatial and temporal granularity within a logical multidimensional model. The spatial data representation through a multidimensional model clarifies the understanding of the data analysis subject and it allows discovering special behavior hardly detected without it. We propose an extension of the Snowflake model to gather the spatial data and to show our proposal to represent the spatial evolution through the time in an easy and intuitive way. We represented the temporal and spatial multigranularity with different levels in the hierarchies of the dimensions, and we present a typology of hierarchies to include more semantics in the Snowflake schema.