Managing moving objects and their trajectories

Abstract

Today?s Internet-enabled mobile devices are equipped with geo-positioning sensors that can readily identify location information, notably GPS data. This has resulted in the availability of rapidly increasing volumes of GPS data that record the movement histories of moving objects. This thesis studies three types of spatial queries processing these data, moving continuous queries (MCQ), group discovery queries (GD), and optimal segment queries. MCQs are issued by mobile clients who need to be continuously aware of other clients in its proximity. GD aims to find co-movement patterns from a trajectory database. An optimal segment query identifies optimal segment(s) to setup a new facility, given a set of existing facilities and routes on a road network. For each framework in this thesis, we conduct extensive experiments in realistic settings with both real and synthetic data sets. These experiments offer insight into the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed frameworks.