SDWM: An enhanced spatial data warehouse metamodel

Some research has been done in order to define metamodels for Spatial Data Warehouses (SDW) modeling. However, we observe that most of these works propose metamodels that mix concepts of DW modeling (i.e. dimensions and their descriptive attributes) with concepts of OLAP modeling (i.e. hierarchies and their levels). We understand that this mix is a possible limitation, because a DW (conventional or spatial) is essentially a large data repository, which can be analyzed/queried by any data analysis technology (e.g. GIS, Data Mining and OLAP). With aim of overcoming such limitation, in this paper we propose a SDW metamodel, named Spatial Data Warehouse Metamodel (SDWM), which describes constructors and restrictions needed to model SDW schemas. We have implemented a CASE tool according to our metamodel and, by exploiting this tool, we have designed two demonstrative SDW schemas.