An Approach to Enabling Spatial OLAP by Aggregating on Spatial Hierarchy

Investigation shows that a huge number of spatial data exists in current business databases. Traditional data warehousing and OLAP, however, could not exploit the spatial information to get deep insight into the business data in decision making. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enabling spatial OLAP by aggregating on the spatial hierarchy. A spatial index mechanism is employed to derive the spatial hierarchy for pre-aggregation and materialization, which in turn are leveraged by the OLAP system to efficiently answer spatial OLAP queries. Our prototype system shows that the proposed approach could be integrated easily into the existing data warehouse and OLAP systems to support spatial analysis. Preliminary experiment results are also presented.