Supporting Direction Relations in Spatio-Temporal Databases

Direction relations constitute an important class of user queries in spatial databases and geographic information systems. However, no work has dealt with the processing of such relations in a mobile environment. Supporting direction queries using traditional spatial index structures do not work well in this environment because of the need to frequently update the index, which results in very poor performance. In this work, a new indexing technique, named the R+FnBBx index, is proposed to efficiently handle time-interval and time-slice directional queries in the past, present and future.