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

Moving object databases have recently found large interest in the database community, geographical information systems, and geosciences. So far, moving object models have focused exclusively either on past or future movements. The so-called Balloon Model is the first attempt to treat past and future movements of moving objects in a consistent and integrated manner. Based on a new set of spatio-temporal data types and operations as well as former research, in this paper, the authors propose a design of spatio-temporal predicates on Balloon objects. These predicates explore the topological relationships of Balloon objects over time and take into account both past and future movements.