Spatial Data Mining, Spatial Data Warehousing, and Spatial OLAP

An Introduction To Geo-Spatial Data

GIS (Geographic Information System) simply considered a computer system that enables users to do some analytical processing by capturing, storing, retrieving, sorting, and comparing spatial data. GIS provides various types of patterns displayed on different kinds of generated map with different resolutions that allow users to see the map features more easily and clearly which enable them to more understand the relationships among these patterns (ESRI, 2015) .

GIS provides user with detailed gathered information about geographic places and their spatial relationships. It is considered as a framework concerned with collecting information, providing relationships and making some analytical image processing (ESRI, 2015) .

GIS provides a set of layers as in Figure 1 after interpreting and translating the captured features on a map. These layers represent the spatial data and the relationships among them that reflected from the map processing like for example roads, rivers and political boundaries as in Figure 1 (ESRI, 2015).

Figure 1.

Data layers

Spatial Data

Simply is the information about the locations and geographic features reflected on the processed maps stored as coordinates and topology (ESRI, 2015). There are two main types of spatial data Raster data and Vector data providing different ways in representing and storing data (ESRI, 2015).

Vector Data

Represents data of the real world patterns as points, line and polygons. Streets, Land parcels and lighting poles are examples of vector data storing them as separated boundaries (ESRI, 2015).

The spatial objects are stored using data structures as point, Line and Polygon in the vector as the following (Kuba, 2001)

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  Point: Simply defined by its coordinates.

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  Line: The sequence of points connected together within a line.

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  Polygon: The sequence of connected lines.

Raster Data

Unlike vector data model, the real world on a map is divided into grid of cells as in Figure 2.The advantage over vector data is storing.

Figure 2.

Raster data

The main role of raster models is continuously storing different data like height surface, a satellite picture and chemical concentrations (ESRI, 2015). There are many users that can analyze and discover the relationships among spatial data sets like for example (IBEG, 2011)

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  Advanced GIS users as in Figure 3 (researchers, experts).

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  Statisticians, who do not use GIS tools but use statistical tools as in Figure 4.

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  Ordinary users with no GIS experience.

Figure 3.

Advanced GIS users

Figure 4.

Statisticians users