The Integration of Decision Maker’s Requirements to Develop a Spatial Data Warehouse

Nowadays, technologies such as positioning systems and Internet make it easier to produce and access to geographic information. During the recent years, this fact led to an increasing availability of diverse, heterogeneous and distributed spatial data sources. Those sources contain information collected at different times and use different techniques to aliment spatial data warehouses (SDWs) . The specificities of the SDWs are: (1) The nature of the spatial data requires taking into account possible incompatibilities: the spatial reference (position, shape, orientation, size), the reference systems, in the measure units, the spatial uncertainty, the precision, the size, etc. (2) Other elements to be considered in a warehouse of spatial data: the topology, the spatial integrity constraints, the consistency between scales, etc.