Physical Design and Implementation of Spatial Data Warehouses Supporting Continuous Fields

Although many proposals exist for extending Geographic In formation Systems (GIS) with OLAP and data warehousing capabilities (a topic denoted SOLAP) only recently the importance of supporting continuous fields (i e phenomena that are perceived as having a value at each point in space and/or time) has been acknowledged Examples of such phenomena include temperature altitude or land use In this paper we discuss physical design issues arising when a spatial data ware house includes a combination of spatial and non spatial dimensions and measures and spatio-temporal dimensions representing continuous fields We give the syntax and semantics of the data types (and their opera tors) needed to support fields in SOLAP environments and present an implementation of these types on top of spatial SQL We also show how queries using the spatio-temporal operators for fields are written, parsed, and executed