A spatial data warehouse recommendation approach: conceptual framework and experimental evaluation

Spatial data warehouses store a large amount of historized and aggregated data. They are usually exploited by Spatial OLAP (SOLAP) systems to extract relevant information. Extracting such information may be complex and difficult. The user might ignore what part of the warehouse contains the relevant information and what the next query should be. On the other hand, recommendation systems aim to help users to retrieve relevant information according to their preferences and analytical objectives. Hence, developing a SOLAP recommendation system would enhance spatial data warehouses exploitation. This paper proposes a SOLAP recommendation approach that aims to help users better exploit spatial data warehouses and retrieve relevant information by recommending personalized spatial MDX (Multidimensional Expressions) queries. The approach detects implicitly the preferences and needs of SOLAP users using a spatio-semantic similarity measure. The approach is described theoretically and validated by experiments.