CineCubes: cubes as movie stars with little effort

In this paper we investigate how we can exploit the existence of a star schema in order to answer user OLAP queries with CineCube movies. Our method, implemented in an actual system, includes the following steps. The user submits a query over an underlying star schema. Taking this query as input, the system comes up with a set of queries complementing the information content of the original query, and executes them. Then, the system visualizes the query results and accompanies this presentation with a text commenting on the result highlights. Moreover, via a text-to-speech conversion the system automatically produces audio for the constructed text. Each combination of visualization, text and audio practically constitutes a cube movie, which is wrapped as a PowerPoint presentation and returned to the user.