Efficient Index Structures for Spatio-Temporal Objects

In this article we present a family of four tree-based access structures for indexing spatio-temporal objects. Our indexing methods support spatio-temporal, as well as purely spatial and purely temporal queries. 111 order to handle sets of extended spatio-teniporal objects we propose to specialize generalized search trees by combining the advantages of the well-known spatial structures R*-tree ([I]) and SS-tree ([la]). We consider size-based (R*-tree like) and distance-based (SS-tree like) penalty nietrics for insertions, and we view the temporal dimension either as a regular third or as a special dimension. We evaluate the four access methods on diflerent real-life datasets and identifi one of them to be the most efJicient access structure for the case of general spatio-temporal data with known extents in every dimension. This method combines the R*-tree split yolicy with penal41 metric and insertion policy from the SS-tree and treats the temporal diniension as a special dimension.