Definition and Analysis of New Agricultural Farm Energetic Indicators Using Spatial OLAP

Agricultural energy consumption is an important environmental and social issue. Several diagnoses have been proposed to define indicators for analyzing energy consumption at large scale of agricultural farm activities (year, farm, family of production, etc.). However, to define ad-hoc environmental energetic policies to better monitor and control energy consumption, new indicators at a most detailed scale are needed. Moreover, by defining detailed scale indicators, large quantities of geo-referenced data need to be collected to feed these energetic diagnoses. This huge volume of data represents another important limitation of systems that implement these diagnoses because they are usually based on classical data storage systems (such as spreadsheet tools and Database Management Systems). These systems do not allow for interactive analysis at different granularities/scales of huge volumes of data and do not provide any cartographic representation. By contrast, Spatial OLAP (SOLAP) and spatial data warehouse (SDW) systems allow for the analysis of huge volumes of geo-referenced data by providing aggregated numerical values visualized by means of interactive tabular, graphical and cartographic displays. Thus, in this paper, we (i) propose new appropriate indicators to analyze agricultural farm energy performance at a detailed scale and (ii) show how SDW and SOLAP technologies can be used to represent, store and analyze these indicators by simultaneously producing expressive reports.