Determining topological relationship of fuzzy spatiotemporal data integrated with XML twig pattern

Abstract

How to determine topological relationships is one of the most important operations on fuzzy spatiotemporal data. The proposed strategies impose strict restrictions on structure and data types of fuzzy spatiotemporal data, and fall short in their abilities to handle fuzzy attributes extension and fuzzy time extension. To overcome these limitations, in this paper, we first establish a fuzzy spatiotemporal data model based on XML. Then, we propose strategies of transforming two general fuzzy spatiotemporal data trees into one binary fuzzy spatiotemporal data tree. In succession, an effective algorithm to match the desired twigs is proposed after extending the region coding scheme to compatible with fuzzy spatiotemporal data. Our approach adopts XML twig pattern technique to determine topological relationship continuously so that it can reduce unnecessary execution time of querying the desired nodes. More importantly, we use a pointer array to eliminate unnecessary execution time of twig matching. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate the performance advantages of our approach.