Multimedia data warehouses: a multiversion model and a medical application

In field such as Cardiology, data used for clinical studies is not only alphanumeric, but can also be composed of images or signals. Multimedia data warehouse then must be studied in order to provide an efficient environment for the analysis of this data. The analysis environment must include appropriate processing methods in order to compute or extract the knowledge embedded into raw data. Traditional multidimensional models have a static structure which members of dimensions are computed in a unique way. However, multimedia data is often characterized by descriptors that can be obtained by various computation modes. We define these computation modes as "functional versions" of the descriptors. We propose a Functional Multiversion Multidimensional Model by integrating the concept of "version of dimension." This concept defines dimensions with members computed according to various functional versions. This new approach integrates different computation modes of these members into the proposed model, in order to allow the user to select the best representation of data. In this paper, a conceptual model is formally defined and a prototype for this study is presented. A multimedia data warehouse in the medical field has been implemented on a therapeutic study on acute myocardial infarction.