Towards a Spatio-Temporal Information System for Moving Objects

The analysis of movement in the geographic space requires the development of systems and data models supporting storage and querying functions useful for the analysis of how movement evolves and how it is constrained by events or obstacles that emerge in space. In the past, the design of information systems has been often based on application driven approaches and restricted to specific types of positioning technologies, leading to a proliferation of a wide range of data models, database models and functionalities. To overcome this proliferation, this paper proposes a spatio-temporal information system that is independent of the application domain and aiming to abstract the positioning technology used for gathering data. Here we describe the initial design of the basic infrastructure of such a system, integrating a data model and its fundamental functionalities for the collection, storage, retrieval and visualization of positioning data. The results achieved so far are promising to demonstrate how the system is able to store positioning data with different formats, and in applying its functionalities to the loaded data.