Special section on "Spatial data warehouses and SOLAP"

Data Warehouses (DW) and OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools are used in Business Intelligence (BI) applications in order to support decision-making processes. DWs are a specific type of database used to integrate, accumulate and analyze data from various sources. OLAP tools provide means to query and to analyze the warehoused information and produce online statistical summaries (indicators) at different levels of details. These indicators are computed using aggregate functions (e.g. Sum, Avg, Min, Max, etc.). Users can explore DWs by performing OLAP operations (e.g., Roll-up, Drill-down, etc.). Data mining algorithms can also be used in DWs, aiming towards improving data analysis; these techniques help to discern automatically the correlations and causal links between data. The increasing availability of geo-referenced data has made necessary the need to enrich OLAP with spatial analysis tools. OLAP systems were successfully adapted to solve problems in different areas of application and new kinds of decision support systems, named Spatial Data Warehouses (SDW) and Spatial OLAP (SOLAP) tools have been made available. SDWs are a collection of geographical information supporting spatial analysis. SOLAP tools allow users to perform spatio-temporal exploration of data: these tools combine OLAP analysis with cartographic visualization capabilities of GIS systems. The relevance of SOLAP technology Geoinformatica (2014) 18:269–272 DOI 10.1007/s10707-013-0196-9