Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have shown their power when dealing with information that is tied to places. However their analytical functionalities are oriented towards the management of data not towards their effective analysis. On the other hand OLAP technology on which decision support systems (DSS) are based, provide powerful, user-friendly tools that help in the decision making process. The coupling GIS and OLAP has lead to the concept of SOLAP (Spatial OLAP) where GIS provides the cartographic representation and OLAP provides multidimensional perspective of data and. In this paper we present a review of literature of SOLAP, some of the open research issues which are under investigation. We also present some trends in SOLAP such as continuous SOLAP, near real time SOLAP applications, web based interfaces, and so on.
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