Conceptual modeling of spatiotemporal database applications: An ontological view

Spatiotemporal databases have received much attention since more and more applications such as mobile computing and fleet management have urgent requirements on management of spatiotemporal information. Conceptual data modeling Of spatiotemporal applications is used to describe user's cognition of real world phenomena and must support adequate concepts and notations with accurate semantics to allow the developer to capture and present spatiotemporal information. In this paper we propose a conceptual model for spatiotemporal data modeling, which is based on the ontology. The ontology for spatiotemporal changes and spatiotemporal entities are discussed. The conceptual model that we introduce in this paper utilizes Unified Modeling Language (UML) for handling spatiotemporal information, and it can describe spatiotemporal phenomenon effectively.