Definition
Business intelligence (BI) systems collect large amounts of data, transform them to a form that can be used to analyze organizational behavior, and store them in a common repository called a data warehouse (DW). A DW is usually designed following the multidimensional model, which represents data as facts that can be analyzed along a collection of dimensions, composed of levels conforming aggregation hierarchies.
Over the years, spatial data have been increasingly used in many application domains, like public administration, transportation networks, environmental systems, and public health, among others. Spatial data can represent geographic objects (e.g., mountains, cities), geographic phenomena (e.g., temperature, precipitation), and even data located in other spatial frames such as a human body or a house.
Similarly to conventional databases, spatial databases are typically used for operational applications, rather than to support data analysis tasks. Spatial DWs (SDWs)...