Foreword
When I was asked to write the foreword of this book, I was both honored and
enthusiastic about contributing to the first book covering the topic of spatial
data warehousing. In spite of over ten years of scientific literature regarding
spatial data warehousing, spatial data mining, spatial online analytical pro-
cessing, and spatial datacubes, Malinowski and Zim´anyi are the first to invest
the energy necessary to provide a global view of spatial data warehousing in a
coherent manner. This book introduces the reader to the basic concepts in an
academic style that remains easy to read. Although one might think initially
that there is nothing special about spatial data warehouses, this book shows
the opposite by introducing fundamental extensions to the development of
spatial data warehouses. On the one hand, there are extensions required for
the design and implementation phases, and on the other hand there are ex-
tensions that improve the efficiency of these phases. This book offers a broad
coverage of these extensions while at the same time guiding the reader to
more detailed papers, thanks to a representative bibliography giving a sample
of the main papers in the field. In addition, this book contains a glossary
that is very useful for the reader since the datacube paradigm (also called
analytical or multidimensional database paradigm) is very different from the
traditional database paradigm (also called transactional or operational data-
base paradigm).
Of particular interest in this book is the coverage of spatial datacubes, of
their structure, and of implementation details in a data warehouse perspec-
tive. In particular, the different types of spatial hierarchies, spatial measures,
and spatial data implementations are of interest. As a technology of choice to
exploit data warehouses, OLAP technology is discussed with examples from
Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 and from Oracle 10g OLAP Op-
tion. Spatial OLAP (SOLAP) is also mentioned for spatial data warehouses.
In addition to defining spatial and temporal components of datacubes,
the book proposes a method that is based on an extended entity-relationship
approach, the spatial and temporal extensions of the MADS model, and a
waterfall-based design approach. Readers already using the entity-relationship
