CASME: A CASE Tool for Spatial Data Marts Design and Generation

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) showed their insufficiencies in front of complex requests for decision-makers. Resulting of the association of the databases and the decision-making systems the decisional data processing was developed since the beginning of the 90th as a new way. The decisional databases thus emerged in order to answer the specific needs for OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP) and data mining. Extensions were made to make appropriate the analysis and the algorithms to specificities of the handled spatial data. This paper describes the modeling and implementation of Spatial Data Mart (SDM). We define a formal framework for the progressive construction of spatial data warehouses by assembling these SDM. Our approach includes a meta model for SDM construction. The construction is done in accordance with the UML meta model. After the validation step, construction is followed by an automatic generation of the spatial data mart in Spatial Oracle. A CASE tool, called CASME (Computer Aided Spatial Mart Engineering), constitutes the interface through which the user will have to carry out the process.