| Managing large volumes of hydrographic data is not an easy task. Technology progress has made this task more complex. Different media storage formats, different logging systems holding their own data structures, and new data collection demands have all emerged as responses to technology advance. These factors degrade data management capability. On the other hand, technology also offers some enabling technologies that allow establishing a proper solution. Data Warehouse concepts along with spatial database enabling technologies permit assembling disparate sets of hydrographic data into a unique repository---A Hydrographic Data Warehouse.;This report presents a Hydrographic Data Warehouse prototype specially designed for the Portuguese Hydrographic Institute (IHPT). Using an off-the-shelf database system---Oracle8i Spatial---as its foundation, it allows users to store and retrieve spatial data, hiding the complexity of communicating directly to a RDBMS. That is achieved using a specific interface (two suitable layers of software) to load and access data. This interface allows users not familiar with Structured Query Language (SQL) to load and access hydrographic data to/from the repository.;To test the proposed prototype efficiency, several packs of hydrographic data provided from the IHPT were successfully loaded into the warehouse. Subsequently, all embedded queries to access data were tested using the previously loaded spatial data with good results. These test results prove that this model could be implemented as a warehouse tool within a Hydrographic Office to hold their bathymetric data. |
