Moving Objects Databases

Overview

This book represents a milestone in the synthesis of temporal and spatial database concepts and techniques. It unifies and organizes the existing research into a coherent whole and presents substantial new results and approaches in many areas. In each case it begins with what is known, then it introduces the new concepts in an abstract and general model, and then it translates the ideas into a pragmatic representation of data structures or SQL-like query language extensions. As such, the book makes both an excellent text and an excellent reference. It also takes you to the frontiers of our understanding, so it is a great point of departure for a new researcher who wants to advance this field.
—from the foreword by Jim Gray, Microsoft Research

The current trends in consumer electronics—including the use of GPS-equipped PDAs, phones, and vehicles, as well as the RFID-tag tracking and sensor networks—require the database support of a specific flavor of spatio-temporal databases. These we call Moving Objects Databases.

Why do you need this book? With current systems, most data management professionals are not able to smoothly integrate spatio-temporal data from moving objects, making data from, say, the path of a hurricane very difficult to model, design, and query. Whether your field is geology, national security, urban planning, mobile computing, or almost anything in between, this book’s concepts and techniques will help you solve the data management problems associated with this kind of data. The book:

+ Focuses on the modeling and design of data from moving objects—such as people, animals, vehicles, hurricanes, forest fires, oil spills, armies, or other objects—as well as the storage, retrieval, and querying of that very voluminous data.
+ Demonstrates through many practical examples and illustrations how new concepts and techniques are used to integrate time and space in database applications.
+ Provides exercises and solutions in each chapter to enable the reader to explore recent research results in practice.

About the Authors

Ralf Hartmut Güting is Professor of computer science at the University of Hagen, Germany. After a one-year visit to the IBM Almaden Research Center in 1985, extensible and spatial database systems became his major research interests. He is the author of two German textbooks on data structures/algorithms and on compilers and has published about 50 articles on computational geometry and database systems. He is an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems.

Markus Schneider is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Florida and holds a doctoral degree in Computer Science from the University of Hagen, Germany. He is author of a monograph in the area of spatial databases and of a German textbook on implementation concepts for database systems, and has published about 40 articles on database systems. He is on the editorial board of GeoInformatica.

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