Archive for the ‘History’ category

GeoMondrian Example

November 18th, 2009

As soon as I’ve started digging into OLAP Architectures I realized how complicated things might become whenever looking for extra features. Most of the commercial OLAP solutions are providing “classic” OLAP features for data warehousing. It means that only simple numeric, strings and dates would be supported. Spatial Data Warehouses  architectures instead, are still in their infancy and there exists no commercial product that is actually providing such SOLAP functionalities. There exists several academic proposals instead which can provide a good overview on the features that can be supported by SOLAP Servers.

One of these acedemic prototypes is Geo Mondrian.

GeoMondrian is a spatially-enabled version of Pentaho Analysis Services (Mondrian). It has been released under the EPL. GeoMondrian is the first implementation of a true SOLAP server. It provides a consistent integration of spatial objects into the OLAP data cube structure, instead of fetching them from a separate spatial database, web service or GIS file. To make a simple analogy, GeoMondrian brings to the Mondrian OLAP server what PostGIS brings to the PostgreSQL database management system.

Unfortunately the documentation and getting-started guides are missing right now… That’s why I’ve decided to publish a couple of advices to whom may decide to use GeoMondrian for  developing SOLAP applications. Here attached you can find an archive that contains all that you need to setup a sample SOLAP server with geographic data source. It is designed to be working on PostgreSQL+Postigs since it is the only spatial database to be supported right now.

What you have to do in order to be able to use this unofficial build release of GeoMondrian is to load the .SQL script into your postgresql+postgis database and than run the Test application (be sure that the .XML schema definition is in the same parent directory, to have set up properly your JDBC connection and have included the libraries that are present in the “lib” folder).

I hope that it will help!

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the Italian @

May 9th, 2009

@

I was reading the New York Times, where I discovered an interesting article standing out again from the crowd of tech reviews. I’m always attracted by the searticles that describe Italians and Italian researches, since the objectivity of  NY Times journalists make easier to understand the real value of that piece of work. In this case the article was digging some years ago (nine to be precise) into “La Repubblica’s” archive which explained why the @ symbol was firstly used by italian merchants. A Florentine merchant named Francesco Lapi used the symbol @ in a letter written 473 years ago today, on May 4, 1536. As prof. Giorgio Stabile (Full professor of   Science’s  history at “La Sapienza” university, Rome) explained to The Guardian in 2000, Francesco Lapi’s letter was sent from Seville to Rome and described the cargo on three ships that had just returned to Spain from Latin America:

“There, an amphora of wine, which is one thirtieth of a barrel, is worth 70 or 80 ducats,” Mr. Lapi informs his correspondent, representing the amphora with the now familiar symbol of an “a” wrapped in its own tail.The Spanish word for amphora was “arroba,” and the Oxford English

Dictionary explains that the unit was approximately 25 pounds of a solid or about 3 gallons of a liquid. In modern Spanish, the @ symbol on keyboards is still called an arroba — as a Google image search illustrates. The word “arroba” itself was a Spanish corruption of an older Arabic word.

(src)

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Posted in History, Reviews

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