Data aggregation in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a desirable feature, although only marginally present in commercial systems, which also fail to provide integration between GIS and OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing). With this in mind, we have developed Piet, a system that makes use of a novel query processing technique: first, a process called  sub-polygonization  decomposes each thematic layer in a GIS, into open convex polygons; then, another process computes and stores in a database the overlay of those layers for later use by a query processor. We describe the implementation of Piet, and provide experimental evidence that  overlay precomputation  can outperform GIS systems that employ indexing schemes based on R-trees.
['Ariel Escribano', 'Leticia I. Gómez', 'Bart Kuijpers', 'Alejandro A. Vaisman']
Piet: a GIS-OLAP implementation