An object oriented multidimensional data model for OLAP

Abstract

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) data is frequently organized in the form of multidimensional data cubes each of which is used to examine a set of data values, called measures, associated with multiple dimensions and their multiple levels. In this paper, we first propose a conceptual multidimensional data model, which is able to represent and capture natural hierarchical relationships among members within a dimension as well as the relationships between dimension members and measure data values. Hereafter, dimensions and data cubes with their operators are formally introduced. Afterward, we use UML (Unified Modeling Language) to model the conceptual multidimensional model in the context of object oriented databases.