Context

Project Overview

What is a Cube?

Fabian: I am no cube specialist, and no statistics specialist either, so I would need some help here, but I start with some questions/discussions that seems needed IMHO. The goal would certainly be to describe a Cube as simply as possible, so that "Excel" users will understand the tool, and Statistical experts, who are familiar with complex cubes, would also understand the tool.

I did not find a specific description of what a cube is on Zazuko's cube page, and the definition given for the W3C Data Cube seems too complex.

Would it be possible to simplify the description, for instance:
"A cube is a collection of observations.
Within this tool, a cube can be seen as a table or matrix (similar to a spreadsheet), where each line is an observation and each column is a dimension. All observations of a cube have the same structure (i.e. same dimensions)"

That proposal would reduce the concept of "Cube" (a multi-dimensional representation) to the concept of Table (a two-dimensional representation)
-> would that be ok ? maybe yes, as the main definition of the cube is the "Observation table".
And maybe here we should take into consideration the further coming explanation about "literal" vs "link to another table" situation.
This representation of a main table with links to "secondary" tables should be clear for the end-users, as already discussed with Véronique (similar to databases, spreadsheet, etc.).

This vision can make sens if, compared to the W3C RDF data cube that makes distinctions between 3 different components "dimensions, attributes and measures", Zazuko designed its cube with a much "simpler" concept where those 3 components are now just "dimensions" or just "columns", is it the case ?

In the context of the Cube Creator, are "dimensions" and "columns" synonyms ? The Cube Creator interface talks about columns, as the "Edit column mapping" formular But we still use the term "dimension" for the "Managed dimensions"... Was any decision taken about this, is there still a need to go further with the issue Implement naming concept / consistent wording