Modeling Historical and Future Movements of Spatio-Temporal Objects in Moving Objects Databases

Spatio-temporal databases deal with geometries changing over time. In general, geometries do not only change discretely but continuously; hence the authors are dealing with moving objects. In the past, a few moving object data models and query languages have been proposed. Each of them supports either historical movements or future movements but not both together. Consequently, queries that start in the past and extend into the future cannot be supported. To model both historical and future movements of an object, two separate concepts with different properties are required, and extra attention is necessary to avoid their conflicts.