GeoOlap: An Integrated Approach for Decision Support

The integration of information from different sources within the enterprise is one of the basis for implementing successful Decision Support Systems (DSS). Typically a DSS supplies analytical information obtained and transformed from large data warehouses. Recently, the geographical component of information has become more important due to the growing use of this type of information in logistics, marketing, and other applications. This work describes GeoOlap, a decision support approach that proposes a method to develop decision support applications that integrates analytical and georeferenced elements from the ground up at the design stage and OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) and GIS (Geographical Information System) technologies to visualize the results. Additionally, this paper describes PostGeoOlap, an open source general-purpose tool, which supports GeoOlap and that allows developers to easily build decision support applications. A case study is presented to validate the proposed ideas.