Towards a query language for spatiotemporal data based on a formal algebra

The monitoring of land use and cover changes is essential for understanding several environmental and socio-economic processes in the World. This monitoring requires novel software tools able to process big spatiotemporal data sets generated from Earth observation satellites efficiently. To generate land use and cover maps, researchers from different areas need high-level mechanisms to easily handle these big data sets. Thus, this paper presents a query language for spatiotemporal data based on an algebraic formalism. By defining and implementing a temporal interval algebra, we can answer questions about land use and cover changes. For each location in study area, a time series is extracted of pre-processed and classified Earth observation data.