Requirements specification and conceptual modeling for spatial data warehouses

Development of a spatial data warehouse (SDW) is a complex task, which if assisted with the methodological framework could facilitate its realization. In particular, the requirements specification phase, being one of the earliest steps of system development, should attract attention since it may entail significant problems if faulty or incomplete. However, a lack of methodology for the SDW design and the presence of two actors in specifying data requirements, i.e., users and source systems, complicates more the development process. In this paper, we propose three different approaches for requirements specifications that lead to the creation of conceptual schemas for SDW applications.