on top of

[Sepmre]

Cheetah: A High Performance, Custom Data Warehouse on Top of MapReduce

Large-scale data analysis has become increasingly impor tant for many enterprises. Recently, a new distributed com- puting paradigm, called MapReduce, and its open source implementation Hadoop, has been widely adopted due to its impressive scalability and flexibility to handle structured as well as unstructured data. In this paper, we describe our data warehouse system, called Cheetah, built on top of MapReduce.

Given the title and the paragraph above, what does mean "on top of"?

Thank you

 

[GoesStation]

The paragraph is written by a non-native English speaker. In this context, "on top of" means layered over; Cheetah apparently adds functionality to MapReduce.

 

[Sepmre]

Thank you very much.

What's your opinion about this sentence;"We define virtual views on top of the common data warehouse star/snowflake schema" .

Does "on top of" here mean " about", "on"?

 

[GoesStation]

You could say "based on the common data warehouse star schema."

 

[Tdol]

Built on top of also works for me in this context.