Spatio-temporal Information Systems in a Statistical Context

The Italian National Statistics Institute is currently integrating its various spatio-temporal data collections. This paper discusses some issues and solutions related to the development of an integrated system, whose implementation relied on Web and relational technologies to cope with data heterogeneity. The system provides users with many different classes of functions with which to analyse and visualise territorial data. It can be viewed as a spatio-temporal data warehouse, where space and time are the main access dimensions to statistical data, but also where space can be analysed according to its temporal mutations as a preliminary step in the design activity of a statistical survey. The system overcomes a drawback of current commercial data warehouse systems, which are not able to cope with the dynamic behaviour of a dimension - that is, its temporal evolution.