Enabling instant- and interval-based semantics in multidimensional data models: the T+MultiDim Model

Time is a vital facet of every human activity. Data warehouses, which are huge repositories of historical information, must provide analysts with rich mechanisms for managing the temporal aspects of information. In this paper, we (i) propose T+MultiDim, a multidimensional conceptual data model enabling both instant- and interval-based semantics over temporal dimensions, and (ii) provide suitable OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) operators for querying temporal information. T+MultiDim allows one to design typical concepts of a data warehouse including temporal dimensions, and provides one with the new possibility of conceptually connecting different temporal dimensions for exploiting temporally aggregated data. The proposed approach allows one to specify and to evaluate powerful OLAP queries over information from data warehouses. In particular, we define a set of OLAP operators to deal with interval-based temporal data. Such operators allow the user to derive new measure values associated to different intervals/instants, according to different temporal semantics. Moreover, we propose and discuss through examples from the healthcare domain the SQL specification of all the temporal OLAP operators we define.