Business intelligence and geographic information system for hydrogeology

Abstract

We have developed the Hydrogeological Information System (HgIS). Its purpose is to load data from available data sources of any kind, to visualize and analyze data and to implement simple models. HgIS is mostly built upon the Pentaho business intelligence (BI) platform. HgIS uses only some components of BI in comparison to enterprise BI solutions. Adequacy and limitation of data warehousing and BI application for groundwater data is discussed. Data extraction, transformation and loading is focused on integration of wide variety of structured and semi-structured data. Data warehouse uses a hybrid snowflake/star schema. Inmon’s paradigm is used because data semantics is known and the volume of data is limited. HgIS is data agnostic, database agnostic, scalable and interoperable. The architecture of the system corresponds to a spatial business intelligence solution (GeoBI) – a combination of BI and geographic information systems (GIS). Groundwater practitioners have worked with GIS software for decades but BI technologies and tools have not previously been applied to groundwater data.