A Review on OLAP Technologies Applied to Information Networks

Abstract

Many real systems produce network data or highly interconnected data, which can be called information networks. These information networks form a critical component in modern information infrastructure, constituting a large graph data volume. The analysis of information network data covers several technological areas, among them OLAP technologies. OLAP is a technology that enables multi-dimensional and multi-level analysis on a large volume of data, providing aggregated data visualizations with different perspectives. This article presents a literature review on the main applications of OLAP technology in the analysis of information network data. To achieve such goal, it shows a systematic review to list the works that apply OLAP technologies in graph data. It defines seven comparison criteria (Materialization, Network, Selection, Aggregation, Model, OLAP Operations, Analytics) to qualify the works found based on their functionalities. The works are analyzed according to each criterion and discussed to identify trends and challenges in the application of OLAP in the information network.