OLAP and Scientific Data

While I’ve been pushing the ideas of using OLAP data cubes to evaluate scientific data for awhile, I thought it might be a good time to pull together some relevant papers and links. I believe OLAP is ideal to help analyze large quantities of data including time series information...making it easier for the scientist/researcher to explore the data in real-time and from tools they know like Excel.  For example the data served up on FluxData site is done by creating OLAP cubes using SQL Server Analysis Services.

A couple of tools/links that might be of interest as well:

• The Data Mining Add-ins for Office 2007 - very useful since you can do much of the data mining directly from Excel.   Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Data Mining Add-ins for Microsoft Office 2007
• https://www.sqlserverdatamining.com
• SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services
• Microsoft Computational Biology Web Tools
• Jamie’s blog

Here are a couple of papers that reference the use of OLAP for different types of scientific data.

• MSR-TR-2008-71 - Enabling Eco-Science Analysis with MatLab and DataCubes in the Cloud
• MSR-TR-2006-134 - Using Data-Cubes in Science: an Example from Environmental Monitoring of the Soil Ecosystem
• Dynameomics: a multi-dimensional analysis-optimized database for dynamic protein data. Protein Engineering Design & Selection, 2008 21: 379-386, 2008
• MSR-TR-2007-17 - Reporting@Home: Delivering Dynamic Graphical Feedback to Participants and Researchers in Community Computing Projects
• MSR-TR-2006-90 - Life Under Your Feet: An End-to-End Soil Ecology Sensor Network, Database, Web Server, and Analysis Service
• Berkeley Water Center Data Server Publications