Towards a Geographic Data Warehouse for Water Resources Management

The Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have become strategic tools in many fields such as communications, water resources and natural risks management. In parallel with the growth of this technology occurred the expansion of data warehouses (DW), which are most representative of Decision Support Systems. The similarities in the decisional trends between DW and GIS have inevitably led to merge them in a new single technology: Geographic Data Warehouses (GDW). In order to benefit from the power of dedicated DW tools, such as Online Analytical Process (OLAP), and data mining, several works have contributed to define a geographic adaptation of data warehouses concepts. This paper shows the impact of combining the power of GIS and DW to construct a geographic data warehouse. We propose a general frame to design a geographic data warehouse applied to water resources management.