Current Approaches, Challenges, and Perspectives on Spatial OLAP for Agri-Environmental Analysis

Spatial OLAP (SOLAP) systems are powerful GeoBusiness Intelligence tools for analysing massive volumes of geo-referenced datasets. Therefore, these technologies are receiving considerable attention in the research community and in the database industry as well. Applications of these technologies are current in several domains such as ad marketing, healthcare, and urban development, to name a few. Contrary to other application domains, in the context of agri-environmental data and analysis, SOLAP systems have been underexploited. Therefore, in this paper, the author makes an exhaustive survey of most of the published studies in the domain of the SOLAP analysis of agri-environmental data with an emphasis on the reasons why only few recent works investigate the use of SOLAP systems in the agri-environmental context. In particular, the author focuses on the complexity of the spatio-multidimensional model and its implementation. Moreover, based on surveying the state of the art in this domain, this paper identifies some general guidelines that must be considered by the scientific community to design and implement efficient SOLAP approaches to the analysis of geo-referenced agri-environmental datasets. Finally, open issues about warehousing and OLAPing agri-environmental data are also shown in the paper.