Event-based Spatio-temporal Database Design

Both structural and behavioral aspects need to be modeled in some spatio-temporal databases. There existing initial efforts to represent behavioral aspects of the spatio-temporal applications via events gave their priority to some local or partial behaviors rather than an overview of the system’s behavior. In this paper, an event-based approach is proposed for modeling the system’s behavior of the spatio-temporal process of building reviewing. The relations between eventevent, event-state and state-state in the building reviewing process are analyzed. An event-flow diagram and a casual entity-relation diagram are developed for representing these relations. Event-based spatio-temporal queries are discussed. The proposed approach has been used in developing the spatio-temporal databases of the computersupported collaborative building reviewing system in Changzhou municipality. Further investigation in this field includes causal modeling between agents and events, formal definition and specification of events and states, event-based spatio-temporal data organization and query.