From environmental management to land planning and geo-marketing, the
number of application domains that may greatly benefit from using data
enriched with spatio-temporal features is expanding very rapidly.
Unfortunately, development of new spatio-temporal applications is
hampered by the lack of conceptual design methods suited to cope with
the additional complexity of spatio-temporal data.
This book shows that a conceptual design approach for spatio-temporal
databases is both feasible and easy to apprehend. The authors provide a
detailed and comprehensive description of an approach that fills the gap
between application conceptual requirements and system capabilities,
covering both data modeling and data manipulation features.
The ideas presented summarize several years of research on the
characteristics and description of space, time, and perception. In
addition to the authors' own data modeling approach, MADS (Modeling of
Application Data with Spatio-temporal features), the book also surveys
alternative data models and approaches that target support of
spatio-temporal modeling.