A foundation for spatial data warehouses on the Semantic Web

What is it about?

Large volumes of geospatial data is being published on the Semantic Web (SW), yielding a need for advanced analysis of such data. However, existing SW technologies only support advanced analytical concepts such as multidimensional (MD) data warehouses and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) over non-spatial SW data. To remedy this need, this paper presents the QB4SOLAP vocabulary which supports spatially enhanced MD data cubes over RDF data. The paper also defines a number of Spatial OLAP (SOLAP) operators over QB4SOLAP cubes and provides algorithms for generating spatially extended SPARQL queries from the SOLAP operators. The proposals are validated by applying them to a realistic use case.

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Why is it important?

We present a comprehensive foundation on how to represent and query spatial data warehouses (on the Semantic Web) in RDF format. We address the formalization of spatial concepts (topological relations, spatial aggregate functions) and multi-dimensional data warehouse concepts (hierarchies, levels, measures etc.) in our foundation.