Enabling spatial OLAP over environmental and farming data with QB4SOLAP

Abstract

Governmental organizations and agencies have been making large amounts of spatial data available on the Semantic Web (SW). However, we still lack efficient techniques for analyzing such large amounts of data as we know them from relational database systems, e.g., multidimensional (MD) data warehouses and On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP). A basic prerequisite to enable such advanced analytics is a well-defined schema, which can be defined using the QB4SOLAP vocabulary that provides sufficient context for spatial OLAP (SOLAP). In this paper, we address the challenging problem of MD querying with SOLAP operations on the SW by applying QB4SOLAP to a non-trivial spatial use case based on real-world open governmental data sets across various spatial domains. We describe the process of combining, interpreting, and publishing disparate spatial data sets as a spatial data cube on the SW and show how to query it with SOLAP operators.