Hermes - A framework for location-based data management

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate Hermes, a robust framework capable of aiding a spatio-temporal database developer in modeling, constructing and querying a database with dynamic objects that change location, shape and size, either discretely or continuously in time. Hermes provides spatio-temporal functionality to state-of-the-art Object-Relational DBMS (ORDBMS). The prototype has been designed as an extension of STAU [6], which provides data management infrastructure for historical moving objects, so as to additionally support the demands of real time dynamic applications (e.g. Location-Based Services - LBS). The produced type system is packaged and provided as a data cartridge using the extensibility interface of Oracle10g. The offspring of the above framework extends PL/SQL with spatio-temporal semantics. The serviceableness of the resulting query language is demonstrated by realizing queries that have been proposed in [9] as a benchmarking framework for the evaluation of LBS.