A design and practical use of spatial data warehouse

The major reason that spatial data warehousing has attracted a great deal of attention in business GIS in recent years is due to the wide availability of huge amount of spatial data and the imminent need for turning such data into useful geographic information. Therefore, this study focuses on designing and implementing the pilot system for spatial decision making. It designed a system that estimates the targeted marketing area by evaluating the purchasing power of customers spatially. We used both the quantity of credit card transactions and the number of customers using credit card in a department store in Seoul. The spatial distribution or pattern was analyzed and the spatial clusters were developed in order to seek for spatial meaning within the data acquired. The system provides OLAP tools for the interactive analysis of multidimensional data with geographically various granularities, which helps to facilitate effective spatial data mining. We adopted the snowflake schema model capabilities into the system.