Processamento de consultas analíticas com predicados de similaridade entre imagens em ambientes de data warehousing

Abstract

A data warehousing environment offers support to the decision-making process. It consolidates data from distributed, autonomous and heterogeneous information sources into one of its main components, the data warehouse. Furthermore, it provides efficient processing of analytical queries (i.e. OLAP queries). A conventional data warehouse stores only alphanumeric data. On the other hand, an image data warehouse stores not only alphanumeric data but also intrinsic features of images, thus allowing data warehousing environments to perform analytical similarity queries over images. This requires the development of strategies to provide efficient processing of these complex and costly queries. Although there are a number of approaches in the literature aimed at the development of bitmap index for data warehouses and metric access methods for the efficient processing of similarity queries over images, to the best of our knowledge, there is not an approach that investigate these two issues in the same setting. In this research, we fill this gap in the literature by introducing the following main contributions: (i) the proposal of the ImageDW-index, an optimization mechanism aimed at the efficient processing of analytical queries extended with similarity predicates over images; and (ii) definition of different processing strategies for image data warehouses using the ImageDW-index. In order to validate these main proposals, we also introduce two secondary contributions, as follows: (iii) the ImageDW-Gen, a data generator to populate image data warehouses; and (iv) the proposal of four query classes, each one enforcing different query processing costs associated to the similarity predicates in image data warehousing environments. Using the ImageDW-Gen, performance tests were carried out in order to investigate the advantages introduced by the proposed strategies, according to the query classes. Compared to the most related work available in the literature, the ImageDW-index provided a performance gain that varied from 55.57% to 82.16%, considering one of the proposed strategies.