Towards Managing the Risks of Data Misuse for Spatial Datacubes

Over the years, the mass consumption of spatial data caused several concerns in the geomatics community about the risk of data to be misused, especially by people who have little expertise in spatial referencing methods and their impact on spatial analysis. These concerns increased recently with the arrival of a new category of spatial decision-support applications, called Spatial OLAP or SOLAP. These applications add a spatial component to the traditional OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) tools, which are one of the most widely used BI (Business Intelligence) solutions. They allow users to easily, quickly, and interactively explore spatial data of different themes and at different levels of detail. Such easiness, interactivity, speed and flexibility improve users’ capability to analyze spatial data and support decisions. However, it opened the door to a larger group of users who may not completely be aware or understand the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the data. The main objective of this paper is to propose a generic approach to help producers identifying potential risks of spatial datacube misuse and different ways to manage them, such as the communication of context-sensitive warnings to end-users. The proposed approach is mainly inspired by risk management theories found in the field of project management and ISO standards. It also considers the data producers' legal duties towards the end-users which exist in Europe and America. These legal duties are mainly to inform, advise, and warn the users in their utilization of the data. Although specifically developed for spatial datacubes (SOLAP applications), several aspects of this approach are relevant for GIS and universal server transactional databases.