Complex Patten Processing in Spatio-temporal Databases

Yang Zheng, Annies Ductan, Devin Thomas, Mohamed Y. Eltabakh

Abstract: The increasing complexity of spatio-temporal applications has caused the underlying queries to be more sophisticated and usually carry complex semantics. As a result, the traditional spatio-temporal query types, e.g., range, kNN, and aggregation queries, have become just building blocks in more complex query plans. In this paper, we present the STEPQ system, which is an extensible spatio-temporal query engine for complex pattern processing over spatio-temporal data. STEPQ enables full-fledged and optimized integration between spatiotemporal queries and complex event processing (CEP). This integration enables expressing complex queries that execute the desired application semantics without the need for indifferent middle-aware or application level support. The system is implemented using TerraLib module on top of PostgreSQL DBMSs. The experimental evaluation demonstrates the feasibility and practicality of the STEPQ system, and the efficiency of the proposed optimizations.