Linked data cubes: Research results so far

Abstract

During the last years a growing body of literature studied Linked Data Cubes. The objective of this paper is to accumulate this body of knowledge and provide a preliminary analysis of the research results in the area so far. Towards this end, we systematically reviewed the scientific literature to identify relevant studies. These studies were analysed and synthesised in the form of a proposed conceptual framework, which was thereafter applied to further analyse this literature, hence gaining new insights into the field. The framework comprises three dimensions, namely category of contribution, step of data analysis, and application area. The application of the framework resulted in interesting findings. For example, the majority of the contributions that focus on publishing linked data cubes are cases while the majority of the exploitation contributions are software tools. Moreover, integration of data cubes remains largely unexamined in the literature. This paper, however, does not present the final results of the analysis of the literature as this is still an ongoing activity.