Spatial DataWarehouses: Some Solutions and Unresolved Problems

Spatial Data Warehouses (SDWs) combine spatial databases and data warehouses allowing analysis of historical data represented in a space. This data can be queried using Spatial On-Line Analytical Processing (SOLAP) systems. SDW and SOLAP systems are emerging areas that raise several research issues. In this paper, we refer to different problems existing in SDWs that motivated us to propose the MultiDimER model - a conceptual multidimensional model able to express users' requirements for SDW and SOLAP applications. We present also different research directions that are important to consider to provide satisfactory solutions for SDW and for SOLAP systems.