Affordable web-based spatio-temporal applications for ad-hoc decisions

Abstract. Nowadays, decision making requires involving complex, multidimensional context information. Therefore, the concept of Spatial Data Warehouses (SDW) offers a suitable solution for fast access of data on different aggregation levels, but the required detailed information and its dimensions are not always available a-priori: (1) user data demand can change unpredictably in the course of the analysis, (2) commercial context data is expensive or needs to be requested on demand from third-party providers like Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and (3) the initial SDW model can change during analysis by adding derived computation results at any level of detail. This paper proposes an approach for building an infrastructure based on open standards to construct and use virtual SDWs dynamically. In particular, services for loading and consolidating new types of spatio-temporal data on demand are discussed. Considering different spatio-temporal models, the paper proposes an implementation solution based on web services