Moving Object Database Engines

Abstract

Spatial database research has focused on supporting the modeling and querying of geometries associated with objects in a database. Regarding static spatial data, the major commercial as well as open source database management systems (e.g. DB2, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server) already provide appropriate data management and querying mechanisms that conform to Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards. On the other hand, temporal databases have focused on extending the knowledge kept in a database about the current state of the real world to include the past, in the two senses of “the past of the real world” (valid time) and “the past states of the database” (transaction time). The recent years’ effort is an attempt to achieve an appropriate kind of interaction between both sub-areas of database research. Spatiotemporal databases are the outcome of the aggregation of time and space into a single framework. As delineated in several surveys in the literature of spatiotemporal databases, a serious weakness is that the majority of the proposed approaches deals with few common characteristics found across a number of specific applications. Thus the applicability of each approach to different cases, fails on spatiotemporal behaviors not anticipated by the application used for the initial model development. For the previous reason, the field of the Moving Objects Database (MOD) has emerged and has shown that it presents the most desirable properties among various proposals. However, although a lot of research has been carried out in the field of MOD, most of the efforts do not pay attention into embedding the proposed algorithms (i.e., access methods and query processing techniques) on top of existing DBMS where real-world organizations base on. The goal of this chapter is to describe effective frameworks capable of aiding either an analyst working with mobility data, or more technically, a MOD developer in implementing a MOD in a real DBMS.