Spatio-Temporal Databases

Spatio-temporal databases have become very important in recent years, as many real world applications like, location based services, Geographic information systems, etc need to store real world data which shows spatial as well as temporal characteristics, into database. Many data objects in real world have attributes related to both space and time, and managing them using existing RDBMS is complex and in-efficient, as these objects which show spatio-temporal behavior are multi-dimensional in nature. For example an object changing its geometry over its course, exhibits both spatial as well as temporal qualities, as it can change its shape at different points in time, as well as the location of the object. There is a need to store these objects and view it the same way it was at any particular point in time. The main challenge here is that, traditional database management systems are geared towards providing efficient support for simple objects which have just a discrete values attached to them. However, in the case of spatio-temporal objects, in addition to the value of objects, the time of occurrence & the spatial location also need to be considered; hence coming up with an efficient DBMS which will consider these different dimensions into account is very much important. This is an effort at combining the spatial and temporal data models and database systems to work with spatio-temporal data. In this spatio-temporal database, main focus is on the intersection of spatial and temporal concepts to come up with new techniques to manage spatio-temporal information systems.