Spatial data cube: provides better support for spatial data mining

Spatial data mining is a promising technique that deals with extraction of implicit knowledge or other interesting patterns from large amount of spatial data. Though most data mining systems work with data stored in flat files or operational database, it has been recognized that mining in a data warehouse usually result in better information. Because data are usually cleansed before they are stored into data warehouse. Furthermore, data warehouse provides data with different levels of summarization for the clients, which will lead to fruitful data mining. However, current techniques of data warehouse can not handle spatial data well. Both dimensions and measures in the data model of data warehouse are nonspatial data. In this paper, we propose a new data model called spatial data cube for data warehouse. Spatial data cube supports both spatial and nonspatial data. We also introduce how to construct a spatial data cube that can answer queries efficiently by selective materialization. We believe that the spatial data cube can provide better support for spatial data mining.