Modeling historical and future movements of spatio-temporal objects in moving objects databases

ABSTRACT

Spatio-temporal databases deal with geometries changing over time. In general, geometries do not only change discretely but continuously; hence we are dealing with moving objects. In the past, a few moving object data models and query languages have been proposed. Each of them supports either historical movements or future movements but not both together. Consequently, queries that start in the past and extend into the future cannot be supported. To model both historical and future movements of an object, two separate concepts with different properties are required, and extra attention is necessary to avoid their conflicts. Furthermore, current definitions of moving objects are too general and vague. It is unclear how a moving object is allowed to move through space and time. For instance, the continuity or discontinuity of motion is not specified. In this paper, we propose a new moving object data model called Balloon model which provides integrated support for both historical and future movements of moving objects. As part of the model, we provide formal definitions of moving objects with respect to their past and future movements. All kinds of queries including past queries, future queries, and queries that start in the past and end in the future are supported in our model.

REFERENCES

• 1: Martin Erwig , Ralf Hartmut Güting , Markus Schneider , Michalis Vazirgiannis, Abstract and discrete modeling of spatio-temporal data types, Proceedings of the 6th ACM international symposium on Advances in geographic information systems, p.131-136, November 02-07, 1998, Washington, D.C., United States [doi>10.1145/288692.288716]
• 2: Martin Erwig , Ralf Hartmut Güting , Markus Schneider , Michalis Vazirgiannis, Spatio-Temporal Data Types: An Approach to Modeling and Querying Moving Objects in Databases, Geoinformatica, v.3 n.3, p.269-296, September 1999 [doi>10.1023/A:1009805532638]
• 3: Martin Erwig , Markus Schneider, Developments in Spatio-Temporal Query Languages, Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Database & Expert Systems Applications, p.441, September 01-03, 1999
• 4: Martin Erwig , Markus Schneider, Visual Specification of Spatio-Temporal Developments, Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, p.187, September 13-16, 1999
• 5: Martin Erwig , Markus Schneider, Query-By-Trace: Visual Predicate Specification in Spatio-Temporal Databases, Proceedings of the Fifth Working Conference on Visual Database Systems: Advances in Visual Information Management, p.199-218, May 10-12, 2000
• 6: Luca Forlizzi , Ralf Hartmut Güting , Enrico Nardelli , Markus Schneider, A data model and data structures for moving objects databases, Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, p.319-330, May 15-18, 2000, Dallas, Texas, United States
• 7: Goce Trajcevski , Ouri Wolfson , Klaus Hinrichs , Sam Chamberlain, Managing uncertainty in moving objects databases, ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), v.29 n.3, p.463-507, September 2004 [doi>10.1145/1016028.1016030]
• 8: Ralf Hartmut Güting , Michael H. Böhlen , Martin Erwig , Christian S. Jensen , Nikos A. Lorentzos , Markus Schneider , Michalis Vazirgiannis, A foundation for representing and querying moving objects, ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), v.25 n.1, p.1-42, March 2000 [doi>10.1145/352958.352963]
• 9: R. H. Güting and M. Schneider. Moving Objects Databases. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2006.
• 10: Jidong Chen , Xiaofeng Meng , Yanyan Guo , Stephane Grumbach , Hui Sun, Modeling and Predicting Future Trajectories of Moving Objects in a Constrained Network, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Mobile Data Management, p.156, May 10-12, 2006 [doi>10.1109/MDM.2006.107]
• 11: H. Mokhtar and J. Su. Universal Trajectory Queries for Moving Object Databases. In Int. Conf. on Mobile Data Management (MDM). IEEE Computer Society, 2004.
• 12: N. Pelekis, B. Theodoulidis, I. Kopanakis, and Y. Theodoridis. Literature Review of Spatio-Temporal Database Models. Knowledge Engineering Review, 2005.
• 13: R. Praing and M. Schneider. A Universal Abstract Model for Future Movements of Moving Objects. In AGILE Int. Conf. on Geographical Information Systems, 2007.
• 14: Markus Schneider , Thomas Behr, Topological relationships between complex spatial objects, ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), v.31 n.1, p.39-81, March 2006 [doi>10.1145/1132863.1132865]
• 15: A. Prasad Sistla , Ouri Wolfson , Sam Chamberlain , Son Dao, Modeling and Querying Moving Objects, Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Data Engineering, p.422-432, April 07-11, 1997
• 16: Erlend Tøssebro , Ralf Hartmut Güting, Creating Representations for Continuously Moving Regions from Observations, Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Advances in Spatial and Temporal Databases, p.321-344, July 12-15, 2001

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.8 Database applications
          Subjects: Spatial databases and GIS

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
balloon model, continuity of evolutions, gis, historical movements, moving objects databases, predictive movements, spatio-temporal data model