A query system for spatiotemporal database applications

In recent years, an increasing number of database applications deal with continuously changing data objects (CCDOs). In these applications, the underlying data management system must support new types of spatiotemporal queries that refer to CCDOs. The expressive power of the supported query language and the query processing algorithms determine the quality and the efficiency of the query system. In contrast to traditional data objects, CCDOs change continuously. Therefore, the relation between two CCDOs may change over time. We define a motion relation as a sequence of one or more distinct topological relations. This paper surveys existing spatiotemporal query types and proposes a powerful spatiotemporal database query language by defining a complete set of motion predicates that can fill the gap between space and time. In addition, the paper discusses how to efficiently process the proposed queries by utilizing existing indexing schemes.