A spatio-temporal extension to the map cube operator

Abstract

OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing) is a set of techniques and operators to facilitate the data analysis usually stored in a data warehouse. In this paper, we extend the functionality of an OLAP operator known as Map Cube with the definition and incorporation of a function that allows the formulation of spatio-temporal queries. For example, consider a data warehouse about crimes that includes data about the places where the crimes were committed. Suppose we want to find and visualize the trajectory (a trajectory is just the path that an object follows through space as a function of time) of the crimes of a suspect beginning with his oldest crime and ending with his most recent one. In order to meet this requirement, we extend the Map Cube operator.