The Great Indoors: A Data Management Frontier

Much of the research on data management for moving objects has assumed an outdoor setting in which objects move in Euclidean space (possibly constrained) or some form of spatial network and in which GPS or GPS-like positioning is assumed explicitly or implicitly. That body of research provides part of an enabling foundation for the growing Location-Based Services industry. However, we lead large parts of our lives in indoor spaces: homes, office buildings, shopping and leisure facilities, and collective transportation infrastructures. The latter may be large: For example, each day in 2009, London Heathrow Airport, UK had on average 180,000 passengers, and the Tokyo Subway (Tokyo Metro and Toei Subway), Japan delivered a daily average of 8.7 million passenger rides in 2008. Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station alone was used by an average of 3.64 million passengers per day in 2007. Indoor differs from outdoor in important ways and thus calls for new research. The remainder of this paper covers selected differences between indoor and outdoor and discusses the implications for research.