A Conceptual Metadata Framework for Spatial Data Warehouse

Metadata represents the information about data to be stored in Data Warehouses. It is a mandatory element of Data Warehouse to build an efficient Data Warehouse. Metadata helps in data integration, lineage, data quality and populating transformed data into data warehouse. Spatial data warehouses are based on spatial data mostly collected from Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and the transactional systems that are specific to an application or enterprise. Metadata design and deployment is the most critical phase in building of data warehouse where it is mandatory to bring the spatial information and data modeling together. In this paper, we present a holistic metadata framework that drives metadata creation for spatial data warehouse. Theoretically, the proposed metadata framework improves the efficiency of accessing of data in response to frequent queries on SDWs. In other words, the proposed framework decreases the response time of the query and accurate information is fetched from Data Warehouse including the spatial information.