Enabling Ubiquitous OLAP Analyses

An OLAP analysis session is carried out as a sequence of OLAP operations applied to multidimensional cubes. At each step of a session, an operation is applied to the result of the previous step in an incremental fashion. Due to its simplicity and flexibility, OLAP is the most adopted paradigm used to explore the data stored in data warehouses. With the goal of expanding the fruition of OLAP analyses, in this thesis we touch several critical topics. We first present our contributions to deal with data extractions from service-oriented sources, which are nowadays used to provide access to many databases and analytic platforms. By addressing data extraction from these sources we make a step towards the integration of external databases into the data warehouse, thus providing richer data that can be analyzed through OLAP sessions. The second topic that we study is that of visualization of multidimensional data, which we exploit to enable OLAP on devices with limited screen and bandwidth capabilities (i.e., mobile devices). Finally, we propose solutions to obtain multidimensional schemata from unconventional sources (e.g., sensor networks), which are crucial to perform multidimensional analyses

Investigating methodologies for evaluating the effectiveness of Integrated Spatial Information System (ISIS) implementation in the valuation department of the City of Cape Town

Includes bibliographical references.The increasing need to develop fully integrated spatial information systems that help improve planning and decision making have led the countries to create partnerships as to facilitate the improved sharing of spatial data and to realise the full potential of spatial data infrastructure. In this process researchers and practitioners use appropriate methods, tools and frameworks to examine, analyse and evaluate the new implemented systems after its implementation. The attempt to find suitable methodologies for evaluating the effectiveness of the system has led to extensive research to develop, identify and test suitable methods and frameworks and to apply these to case studies. This research investigates the methodologies for evaluating the effectiveness of Integrated Spatial Information Systems (ISIS) implemented in the Valuation Department of the City of Cape Town. The spatial information systems of Valuation Department and the effectiveness of ISIS implementation in this Department are investigated