SOLAP technology: Merging business intelligence with geospatial technology for interactive spatio-temporal exploration and analysis of data

To support their analytical processes, today's organizations deploy data warehouses and client tools such as OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) to access, visualize, and analyze their integrated, aggregated and summarized data. Since a large part of these data have a spatial component, better client tools are required to take full advantage of the geometry of the spatial phenomena or objects being analyzed. With this regard, Spatial OLAP (SOLAP) technology offers promising possibilities. A SOLAP tool can be defined as “a type of software that allows rapid and easy navigation within spatial databases and that offers many levels of information granularity, many themes, many epochs and many display modes synchronized or not: maps, tables and diagrams” [Bédard, Y., Proulx, M.J., Rivest, S., 2005. Enrichissement du OLAP pour l'analyse géographique: exemples de réalisation et différentes possibilités technologiques. In: Bentayeb, F., Boussaid, O., Darmont, J., Rabaseda, S. (Eds.), Entrepôts de Données et Analyse en ligne, RNTI B_1. Paris: Cépaduès, pp. 1-20]. SOLAP tools offer a new user interface and are meant to be client applications sitting on top of multi-scale spatial data warehouses or datacubes. As they are based on the multidimensional paradigm, they facilitate the interactive spatio-temporal exploration of data. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how SOLAP concepts support spatio-temporal exploration of data and then to present the geovisualization, interactivity, and animation features of the SOLAP software developed by our research group. This paper first reviews the general concepts behind OLAP and SOLAP systems. This is followed by a discussion of how these SOLAP concepts support spatio-temporal exploration of data. In the subsequent section, SOLAP software is introduced along with features that enable geovisualization, interactivity and animation.