The querying of multidimensional databases can be based on a starnet model, which consists of radial lines emanating from a central point, where each line represents a concept hierarchy for a dimension. Each abstraction level in the hierarchy is called a footprint. These represent the granularities available for use by OLAP operations such as drill-down and roll-up.
Example 4.5 Starnet. A starnet query model for the AllElectronics data warehouse is shown in Figure 4.13. This starnet consists of four radial lines, representing concept hierarchies for the dimensions location, customer, item, and time, respectively. Each line consists of footprints representing abstraction levels of the dimension. For example, the time line has four footprints: “day,” “month,” “quarter,” and “year.” A concept hierarchy may involve a single attribute (e.g., date for the time hierarchy) or several attributes (e.g., the concept hierarchy for location involves the attributes street, city, province or state, and country). In order to examine the item sales at AllElectronics, users can roll up along the time dimension from month to quarter, or, say, drill down along the location dimension from country to city. Concept hierarchies can be used to generalize data by replacing low-level values (such as “day” for the time dimension) by higher-level abstractions (such as “year”), or to specialize data by replacing higher-level abstractions with lower-level values.