Querying vague spatial information in geographic data warehouses

Abstract

Non-redundant geographic data warehouse (GDW) schemas have been recognized as an essential issue in the GDW design. However, little attention has been devoted to the study of how the handling of vague spatial data affects query performance and storage requirements in GDW. In this paper we investigate the query processing performance over non-redundant GDW schemas that are based on different spatial representation approaches for handling spatial data uncertainty. Further, we analyze the indexing issue, aiming at improving query performance on a non-redundant GDW with vague spatial data. We concluded that the adaptation of an existing index for GDW aiming at handling uncertain spatial data does not satisfy completely the performance requirements. Therefore, there is a need for new index structures for processing vague objects in GDW. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.