Spatio-temporal Database Management Systems

This chapter is devoted to architectural and implementation aspects of spatiotemporal database management systems. It starts with a general introduction into architectures and commercial approaches to extending databases by spatiotemporal features. Thereafter, the prototype systems Concert, Secondo, Dedale, Tiger, and GeoToolKit are presented. As we will see, the focus of these systems is on different concepts and implementation aspects of spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal databases, e.g. generic indexing, design of spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal data types and operations, constraint modeling, temporal database management, and 3D/4D database support. A comparison of the prototype systems and a brief résumé conclude the chapter.