On the Requirements for User-Centric Spatial Data Warehousing and SOLAP

Data warehouses and OLAP systems help to analyze complex multidimensional data and provide decision support. With the availability of large amounts of spatial data in recent years, several new models have been proposed to enable the integration of spatial data in data warehouses and to help analyze such data. This is often achieved by a combination of GIS and spatial analysis tools with OLAP and database systems, with the primary goal of supporting spatial analysis dimensions, spatial measures and spatial aggregation operations. However, this poses several new challenges related to spatial data modeling in a multidimensional context, such as the need for new spatial aggregation operations and ensuring consistent and valid results.