Towards a web coverage service for efficient multidimensional information retrieval

1. INTRODUCTION
Many organizations face the challenge of managing and presenting the sheer quantity of data being captured on a monthly, weekly, daily and hourly level. The introduction of business intelligence (BI) applications and technologies has helped organizations gather, provide access to, analyze, and present data and information easily to the decision makers. The applications utilize both relational and multidimensional technologies to form the overall BI infrastructure. From a historical perspective BI is a popularized umbrella term introduced by Howard Dresner of the Gartner Group in 1989 to describe a set of concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems. BI is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. BI solutions include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting and data mining. Microsoft defines BI as: THE PROCESS OF EXTRACTING DATA FROM A DATABASE AND THEN ANALYZING THAT DATA FOR INFORMATION THAT YOU CAN USE TO MAKE INFORMED BSINESS DECISIONS AND TAKE ACTION. However, data is not always used to its full potential and part of its richness, the spatial component, is simply left out. It has been estimated that about 80% of the data stored in corporate databases integrates spatial information that can be characterized by position, shape, orientation or size (Frankin, April 1992). It is obvious that this meaningful data is worth being integrated in the decision making process to provide a complete operational picture.
To gain better advantage of the spatial dimension in decision making the appropriate tools must be used. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are the obvious potential candidate for such a task. (Worboys, 1995) provide this typical definition of a conventional GIS: A GIS IS A COMPUTERBASED INFORMATION SYSTEM THAT ENABLES CAPTURE, MODELING, MANIPULATION, RETRIEVAL, AND PRESENTATION OF GEOGRAPHICALLY REFERENCED DATA. GIS provides functionalities like