Processamento analítico espacial e exploratório integrando dados estruturados e semiestruturados.

Abstract

Business Intelligence (BI) technologies have been successfully applied for data analysis purposes. Traditionally, such analysis is performed in well-controlled and restricted context, where data sources are structured, periodically loaded, static and fully materialized. Nowadays, there is a plenty of data in different formats such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a semi-structured and semantically rich format external to the BI infrastructure. Although such data formats are enriched by semantics and contains a spatial data component, performing data analysis is challenging. As a result, the Exploratory OLAP field has emerged for discovery, acquisition, integration and query such data, aiming at performing a complete and effective analysis on both internal and external data. To the best of our knowledge, there are only two exploratory tools proposed in the literature and they have two major limitations due to only structured data sources can be explored and there is no exploration of the spatial component of the integrated data. While they are exploratory OLAP tools, they are not exploratory SOLAP tools. Based on these tools, this work proposes an Exploratory SOLAP approach that integrates semantic spatial semi-structured data with traditional spatial structured data sources. A system named ExpSOLAP, which supports online SOLAP queries on both data sources, was developed. Finally, a case study was carried out in order to evaluate the ExpSOLAP system based on a dataset originating from the Linked Movie Data Base and using RDF and relational datasets. The formulated queries enabled to validate the conventional and spatial analysis from both data sources.