CobWeb Multidimensional Model and Tag-Cloud Operators for OLAP of Documents

There is an explosion in the amount of textual documents that have been generated and stored in recent years. Effective management of these documents is essential for better exploitation in decisional analyses. In this context, the authors propose their CobWeb multidimensional model based on standard facets and dedicated to the OLAP (on-line analytical processing) of XML documents; it aims to provide decision makers with facilities for expressing their analytical queries. Secondly, they suggest new visualization operators for OLAP query results by introducing the concept of Tag clouds as a means to help decision-makers to display OLAP results in an intuitive format and focus on main concepts. The authors have developed a software prototype called MQF (Multidimensional Query based on Facets) to support their proposals and then tested it on documents from the PubMed collection.