An event-based conceptual model for context-aware movement analysis

Current tracking technologies enable collection of data describing movements of various kinds of objects, including people, animals, icebergs, vehicles, containers with goods, etc. Analysis of movement data is now a hot research topic. However, most of the suggested analysis methods deal with movement data alone. Little has been done to support the analysis of movement in its spatio-temporal context, which includes various spatial and temporal objects as well as diverse properties associated with spatial locations and time moments. Comprehensive analysis of movement requires detection and analysis of relations that occur between moving objects and elements of the context in the process of the movement. We suggest a conceptual model in which movement is considered as a combination of spatial events of diverse types and extents in space and time. Spatial and temporal relations occur between movement events and elements of the spatial and temporal contexts. The model gives a ground to a generic approach based on extraction of interesting events from trajectories and treating the events as independent objects. By means of a prototype implementation, we tested the approach on complex real data about movement of wild animals. The testing showed the validity of the approach.