Treatment of imprecision in data repositories with the aid of KNOLAP

Abstract

Traditional data repositories introduced for the needs of business processing, typically focus on the storage and querying of crisp domains of data. As a result, current commercial data repositories have no facilities for either storing or querying imprecise/ approximate data. No significant attempt has been made for a generic and application independent representation of value imprecision mainly as a property of axes of analysis and also as part of dynamic environment, where potential users may wish to define their “own” axes of analysis for querying either precise or imprecise facts. In such cases, measured values and facts are characterised by descriptive values drawn from a number of dimensions, whereas values of a dimension are organised as hierarchical levels. A solution named H-IFS is presented that allows the representation of flexible hierarchies as part of the dimension structures. An extended multidimensional model named IF-Cube is put forward, which allows the representation of imprecision in facts and dimensions and answering of queries based on imprecise hierarchical preferences. Based on the H-IFS and IF-Cube concepts, a post relational OLAP environment is delivered, the implementation of which is DBMS independent and its performance solely dependent on the underlying DBMS engine