SOLAP4epidemiologist: A spatial data warehousing application in epidemiology domain

Abstract

During last decades, the Provinces of Naples and Caserta, in the Campania Region, experienced a dreadful increase in the level of pollution as effect of documented practices of illegal waste dumping and burning. In the same period, an abnormal increase in deaths due to cancer diseases was registered. Up to now, no impact of waste treatment on human health has been scientifically proven, but it has not even excluded yet. We believe that the availability of simple-to-use analytics tools may be of great help to epidemiologists in managing and querying the huge amount of heterogeneous data disposable for epidemiologic purposes. This paper presents an innovative decision support application SOLAP4epidemiologist, based on Spatial Data Warehousing technologies (Spatial ETL, GIS, Spatial OLAP) able to integrate structured and geo-referenced data coming from different sources and to investigate them by means of user-friendly GUI, using statistical charts and maps representations. © 2013 Springer-Verlag GmbH.