Incorporating Vague Spatial Data in Geographic Data Warehouses: The Proposal of the Abstract Data Type VagueGeometry

• Grant number: 12/12299-8
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Effective date (Start): September 01, 2012
• Effective date (End): October 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science - Computing Methodologies and Techniques
• Principal researcher: Ricardo Rodrigues Ciferri
• Grantee: Anderson Chaves Carniel
• Home Institution: Centro de Ciências Exatas e de Tecnologia (CCET). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 13/19633-3 - Experimental evaluation of abstract data types to handle vague spatial data into geographic data warehouses, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

A data warehouse is a solution for organizing and storing data related to deci-sion-making processes in companies, generating a historical database, highly vo-luminous, subject-oriented and nonvolatile. A geographic data warehouse (DWG) additionally stores spatial data as attributes in dimension tables or as measures in fact tables, that is stores data represented as geometries. While spatial data currently stored in DWGs are crisp, i.e., they have exact location in space and well-defined boundaries, modern geographic applications require the storage of vague spatial data, which have inaccurate location and uncertain boundaries. This master's project aims to incorporate vague spatial data to DWGs. More spe-cifically, we aim to propose and implement a new abstract data type (ADT) called VagueGeometry to represent vague spatial data in a Spatial Database Manage-ment System (SDBMS) based on the relational model. The proposal of the TAD VagueGeometry encompasses the proposal of a physical storage for vague spatial data, which are complex and can have several disjoint parts, and additionally en-compasses changes in the layer of spatial query processing of the DBMS Post-greSQL / PostGIS to allow the treatment of topological relationships involving vague spatial data. We also intend to investigate extensions to the SQL language to incorporate specific topological operators to handle vague spatial data. Alt-hough there are few studies in the literature that implement vague spatial data, these studies have several limitations including the fact that only reuse crisp spa-tial structures already available rather than proposing a specific ADT. In addition these related work have performance issues in processing analytical queries with vague spatial predicates. This master's project, therefore, advances the state of the art in DWGs to fill this gap in the literature.