ISPRS, Vol.34, Part 2W2, “Dynamic and Multi-Dimensional GIS”, Bangkok, May 23-25, 2001
THE DESIGN OF SPATIAL DATA WAREHOUSE
Yijiang ZOU
Xi'an Research Institute of Surveying and Mapping
No.1 Mid-Yanta Road, Xi’an 710054
Tel: 86-029-5533091, Fax: 86-029-5525310
E-mail: zvi.sj@263.net
Keywords: spatial data warehouse database
Abstract
This paper states that it is necessary to develop the spatial data warehouse for the digital earth development, the spatial data integration
and the spatial DSS. The frameworks of the spatial data warehouse are designed, which are the organizational content, the functional
flow chart, the network structure and the hardware & software environment.
1 Instruction
To meet the demands of the global change and the continual
development, it is necessary to integrate, generalize and save
data sets, which come from different units and departments,
according to unification view of information and main subjects.
These data sets are combined with a kind of specialty models by
different directions in order to develop DSS.
1.1 The needs of digital earth development
The aim of digital earth is to integrate the spatial data and the
thematic data, which comes from nature source, environment,
society, economy, military etc, to form the framework of spatial
information from local to whole parts, region to globe. The
framework in digital earth is established on the distributing
network and is based on the common geographic coordinate
system. Besides to support the integration, aggregation and
mutual operation of the spatial data sets, the main function of
framework is to overlay the thematic data sets on the spatial data
sets to support DSS and the scientific research for some
organizations and departments. These thematic data sets which
contain temporal data are consist of the data sets of natural
source, environment, society, economy, military etc. These data
sets are saved in different nodes on the spatial information
network. It is a key technology for digital earth to how to obtain
the spatial data sets and thematic data sets from different spatial
databases and thematic databases in different organizations and
departments and how to integrate, generalize and save these
data sets according to the principle of unification view of
information and main subjects.
1.2 The needs of integration for the spatial data sets
Because of the development and application of GIS, It
results in the multi-source spatial data sets that make some
difficult for the application and share of the spatial data sets. The
characters of the multi-source spatial data sets are concluded
below:
•Multi-semantic character
•Multi- spatiotemporal character
•Multi-scale character
•Multi-mode character to obtain spatial data sets
•Multi-format character to save spatial data sets
With development and popularization of Internet in computer,
it is necessary for different organizations and departments to
share information. Also, geographic spatial information is asked
to share. With development of information technology and GIS,
GIS has divorced from pure geographic system of science and
technology and is combining with IT. People demand more and
more geographic spatial information. Owing to multi-semantic
character, the multi-spatiotemporal character, multi-scale
character, multi-mode character, multi-format character for
spatial data sets and isolation development of GIS, it becomes
difficult to share GIS information. Because of emergence of digital
earth concept, it is an important foundation to share GIS
information for the application of geographic spatial information in
all kinds of unit. It is a key step for sharing GIS information to
integrate Multi-semantic, Multi- spatiotemporal, Multi-scale,
Multi-mode and Multi-format GIS data sets.
1.3 The needs of the spatial DSS
1.3.1 the main elements to determine spatial DSS
The main elements to determine spatial DSS include the
spatial information, the thematic information and the temporal
