Spatiotemporal Data Types

Synonyms

Data types for moving objects

Definition

Abstract data types to represent time dependent geometries, in particular continuously changing geometries, or moving objects. The most important types are moving point and moving region.

Main Text

A moving point represents an entity for which only the time dependent position is of interest. A moving regiondescribes an entity for which the time dependent location as well as the shape and extent are relevant. For example, moving points could represent people, vehicles, such as cars, trucks, ships or airplanes, or animals; moving regions could be hurricanes, forest fires, spread of epidemic diseases, etc. Moving point data may be captured by GPS devices or RFID tags; moving region data may result from processing sequences of satellite images, for example. Geometrically, moving points or moving regions exist in a 3D (2D + time) space if the movement is modeled within the 2D plane; for moving points this can be easily extended to 4D (3D +...