Oporto: a realistic scenario generator for moving objects

The spatio-temporal database research community has just started to investigate benchmarking issues. On one hand we would rather have a benchmark that is representative of real world applications, in order to verify the expressiveness of proposed models. On the other hand, we would like a benchmark that offers a sizeable workload of data and query sets, which could obviously stress the strengths and weaknesses of a broad range of data access methods. This paper offers a framework for a spatio-temporal data set generator, a first step towards a full benchmark for the large real world application field of “smoothly” moving objects with few or no restrictions in motion. The driving application is the modelling of fishing ships where the ships go in the direction of the most attractive shoals of fish while trying to avoid storm areas. Fishes are themselves attracted by plankton areas. Ships are moving points; plankton or storm areas are regions with fixed centre but moving shape; and shoals are moving regions. The specification is written in such a way that the users can easily adjust generation model parameters