Extending Geographic Databases for a Query Language to Support Queries Involving Statistical Data

The concepts abstracted from reality and represented through the dimensions in a Statistical Database (SDB) support the user to use them in query formulation and processing. Instead, all those useful properties involved in a query that cannot be obtained through dimension/s in a SDB (for example, the concept of adjacency) can be presented in a Geographical Database (GDB). This paper presents a conceptual approach to allow the end user, working in a Geographic Database (GDB) environment, to use data cube stored in a Statistical Database (SDB). In this context, we need to extend the geographic data structure with some special `functional attributes'. They support links between environments mentioned above through geographic dimensions always implicitly or explicitly present in SDB. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to propose a solution to answer queries involving data stored in both environments in a transparent way to the user. Then, a query language to support the integration of multidimensional operators with geographic operators is proposed. Finally, the main characteristics of the proposed approach are illustrated through some examples.