SOLAP+: extending the interaction model

Thesis submitted to Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Computer Science

Decision making is a crucial process that can dictate success or failure in today’s businesses and organizations. Decision Support Systems (DSS) are designed in order to help human users with decision making activities. Inside the big family of DSSs there is OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP) - an approach to answer multidimensional queries quickly and effectively. Even though OLAP is recognized as an efficient technique and widely used in mostly every area, it does not offer spatial analysis, spatial data visualization nor exploration. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) had a huge growth in the last years and acquiring and storing spatial data is easier than ever. In order to explore this potential and include spatial data and spatial analysis features to OLAP, Bédard introduced Spatial OLAP (SOLAP). Although it is a relatively new area, many proposals towards SOLAP’s standardization and consolidation have been made,as well as functional tools for different application areas. There are however many issues and topics in SOLAP that are either not covered or with incompatible/non general proposals. We propose to define a generic model for SOLAP interaction based on previous works, extending it to include new visualization options,components and cases; create and present a component-driven architecture proposal for such a tool, including descriptive metamodels, aggregate navigator to increase perfomance and a communication protocol; finally, develop an example prototype that partially implements the proposed interaction features, taking into consideration guidelines for a user friendly, yet powerful and flexible application.