Uncertain spatiotemporal data modeling and algebraic operations based on XML

Abstract

The problem of modeling and operating spatiotemporal data has received a great deal of interest, due to its various applications in the real world such as GIS and sensor database. A wide range of work covering spatial data, temporal data and spatiotemporal data assumes that the data is known, accurate and complete. But in reality, information is often imprecise and imperfect. In addition, traditional data models which are investigating in the context of traditional database suffer from some inadequacy of necessary semantics such as inability to handle imprecise and uncertain information. Consequently, the advent of XML, which has the advantages of simplicity, readability and extensibility, seems to provide an opportunity for modeling and operating uncertain spatiotemporal data. Hence, the new problem that emerges is how to model and operate uncertain spatiotemporal data in XML. Therefore, in this paper, we establish an uncertain spatiotemporal data model based on XML. Then, on the basis of the model we provide a set of algebraic operations for capturing and handling uncertain spatiotemporal data. By employing algebraic operations, we demonstrate how to translate queries expressed in XQuery to our algebra. A translation example shows that our algebraic operations are full of expressive power and illustrates that our algebra can be applied to general data. Apart from this, we also propose a set of equivalence rules to optimize the process of query and give an example to show how the optimization approach works.