Indexing and Retrieval of Historical Aggregate Information about Moving Objects

Spatio-temporal databases store information about the positions of individual objects over time. In many applications however, such as traffic supervision or mobile communication systems, only summarized data, like the average number of cars in an area for a specific period, or phones serviced by a cell each day, is required. Although this information can be obtained from operational databases, its computation is expensive, rendering online processing inapplicable. A vital solution is the construction of a spatiotemporal data warehouse. In this paper, we describe a framework for supporting OLAP operations over spatiotemporal data. We argue that the spatial and temporal dimensions should be modeled as a combined dimension on the data cube and present data structures, which integrate spatiotemporal indexing with pre-aggregation. While the well-known materialization techniques require a-priori knowledge of the grouping hierarchy, we develop methods that utilize the proposed structures fo...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: DEBU
• Authors: Dimitris Papadias, Yufei Tao, Jun Zhang, Nikos Mamoulis, Qiongmao Shen, Jimeng Sun
• Keywords: DEBU 2002, Mobile Communication Systems, Spatiotemporal Data, Spatiotemporal Data Warehouse