Furthermore, products supporting some SOLAP
requirements have appeared on the market recently, either from key players such
as SAS, ESRI, MapInfo, Business Objects, and Cognos, or from smaller innovative
companies such as KHEOPS Technologies and ProClarity. These applications and
technologies are still in their infancy but they already provide new services.
The term spatial OLAP, or SOLAP, was coined by B?©dard (1997) in parallel to the
term spatial databases. Several research projects aiming at combining analytical databases
and spatial databases have been carried out since the mid-1990s. Pioneers from
Simon Fraser University developed the GeoMiner prototype (Stefanovic, 1997) that
included an efficient method for spatial datacube materialization (Han, Stefanovic,
& Koperski, 1998; Stefanovic, Han, & Koperski, 2000). Other pioneers from Laval
University (B?©dard, 1997; Rivest, B?©dard, & Marchand, 2001) experimented with
varied combinations of GIS and OLAP technologies with external users in different
fields of application (B?©dard et al., 2005) before developing the first commercial hybrid
solution: JMap?® Spatial OLAP Extension (B?©dard, 2005). They developed several
concepts, including new OLAP functions, spatiotemporal topological dimensions
(Marchand, 2004), the use of raster representations of space for evolving datacubes
(Miquel, B?©dard, & Brisebois, 2002), and integrating multiple representations in
spatial datacubes (B?©dard & Bernier, 2002; Bernier & B?©dard, 2005), for instance.
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