Towards Data Warehouses for Natural Hazards

Data warehousing has emerged as an effective technique for converting data into useful information. It is an improved approach to integrate data from multiple, often very large, distributed, heterogeneous databases and other information sources. This paper examines the possibility of using data warehousing techniques in the natural hazards management framework to integrate various functional and operational data which are usually scattered across multiple, dispersed and fragmented systems. We present a conceptual data model for the data warehouse in the presence of various data formats such as geographic and multimedia data. We propose OLAP operations for browsing information in the data warehouse.