Title: Spatial data cubes based on shared dimensions and neighbourhood relationship concepts

Authors: Tarik De Melo e Silva Rocha; Rodrigo Rocha Silva; Tiago Garcia De Senna Carneiro; Joubert De Castro Lima

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Ouro Preto, UFOP, Campus Universitario, Ouro Preto, MG, Brazil ' FATEC, Mogi das Cruzes, São Paulo, Brazil; Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra (CISUC), Coimbra, Portugal ' Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Ouro Preto, UFOP, Campus Universitario, Ouro Preto, MG, Brazil ' Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Ouro Preto, UFOP, Campus Universitario, Ouro Preto, MG, Brazil

Abstract: A data cube has exponential storage and runtime complexities with linearly increasing dimensionality; in addition, a spatial data cube further complicates the issue since it integrates spatial features into a data cube. In this paper, a new data cube approach, named spatial cubing, or simply S-cubing, implements two spatial indexing techniques and two spatial non-relational representations. S-cubing based on shared dimensions is the first non-relational solution designed to support spatial data cubes with continuous dimensions, resolution hierarchies and multiple spatial measures and is capable of running on multi-core computer architectures. S-cubing, based on neighbourhood relationships, implements a new data cube hierarchy algorithm using relationships among cells of a regular grid. Thus, this algorithm creates thematic maps from non-geopolitical regular areas, therein avoiding manual hierarchy definitions. A sequential version is found to be faster than a PostGIS implementation and the parallel version achieved a speedup of 13 with 24 threads.

Keywords: spatial OLAP; multidimensional analysis; neighbourhood relationship; data cube; spatial measures; spatial indexing; continuous dimensions.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2021.116084

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2021 Vol.37 No.3, pp.308 - 335

Received: 24 Sep 2018
Accepted: 25 Nov 2018
Published online: 09 Jul 2021 *

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