Interval OLAP: Analyzing interval data

Abstract

The ability to analyze data organized as sequences of events or intervals became important by nowadays applications since such data became ubiquitous. In this paper we propose a formal model and briefly discuss a prototypical implementation for processing interval data in an OLAP style. The fundamental constructs of the formal model include: events, intervals, sequences of intervals, dimensions, dimension hierarchies, a dimension members, and an iCube. The model supports: (1) defining multiple sets of intervals over sequential data, (2) defining measures computed from both, events and intervals, and (3) analyzing the measures in the context set up by dimensions. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.