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