Using Ontologies for the Design of Data Warehouses

Obtaining an implementation of a data warehouse is a complex task that forces designers to acquire wide knowledge of the domain, thus requiring a high level of expertise and becoming it a prone-to-fail task. Based on our experience, we have detected a set of situations we have faced up with in real-world projects in which we believe that the use of ontologies will improve several aspects of the design of data warehouses. The aim of this article is to describe several shortcomings of current data warehouse design approaches and discuss the benefit of using ontologies to overcome them. This work is a starting point for discussing the convenience of using ontologies in data warehouse design.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure

Data modelling for emergency response

Emergency response is one of the most demanding phases in disaster management. The fire brigade, paramedics, police and municipality are the organisations involved in the first response to the incident. They coordinate their work based on welldefined policies and procedures, but they also need the most complete and up-todate information about the incident, which would allow a reliable decision-making.\ud There is a variety of systems answering the needs of different emergency responders, but they have many drawbacks: the systems are developed for a specific sector; it is difficult to exchange information between systems; the systems offer too much or little information, etc. Several systems have been developed to share information during emergencies but usually they maintain the nformation that is coming from field operations in an unstructured way.\ud This report presents a data model for organisation of dynamic data (operational and situational data) for emergency response. The model is developed within the RGI-239 project ‘Geographical Data Infrastructure for Disaster Management’ (GDI4DM)

A Conceptual View on Trajectories

Analysis of trajectory data is the key to a growing number of applications aiming at global understanding and management of complex phenomena that involve moving objects (e.g. worldwide courier distribution, city traffic management, bird migration monitoring). Current DBMS support for such data is limited to the ability to store and query raw movement (i.e. the spatio-temporal position of an object). This paper explores how conceptual modeling could provide applications with direct support of trajectories (i.e. movement data that is structured into countable semantic units) as a first class concept. A specific concern is to allow enriching trajectories with semantic annotations allowing users to attach semantic data to specific parts of the trajectory. Building on a preliminary requirement analysis and an application example, the paper proposes two modeling approaches, one based on a design pattern, the other based on dedicated data types, and illustrates their differences in terms of implementation in an extended-relational context