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Spatio-temporal Query Languages

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Encyclopedia of GIS

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Synonyms

Bi-temporal; ISO; Operator, metric; Operator, spatial; Operator, temporal; Operator, topological; Spatio-temporal data models; SQL/MM; SQL/Temporal

Definition

A spatio-temporal database is a database that embodies spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal database concepts and captures simultaneously spatial and temporal aspects of data. Spatio-temporal databases allow sophisticated queries over time and space to be stated (Erwig and Schneider, 2002). Spatio-temporal query languages are the query languages used to query spatio-temporal databases.

Though we could use the basic data types in SQL to represent spatio-temporal data, however, the queries would be very complicated to write. In some cases, we may not be able to answer some queries. For example, assume there is a traveler. If we use date to represent the start and end of a time interval while the person remains at the same place, and two floating point numbers to represent the coordinates of a point in a two-dimensional...

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Recommended Reading

  • Khatri V, Ram S, Snodgrass RT (2006) On augmenting database design support environments to capture the geo-spatiotemporal data semantics. Inf Syst 31(2):98–133. Elsevier Science Ltd., Oxford

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA, USA

    Cindy X. Chen

Authors
  1. Cindy X. Chen
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

    Shashi Shekhar

  2. Rutgers Business School, Newark, New Jersey, USA

    Hui Xiong

  3. The University of Iowa Tippie College of Business, Iowa City, Iowa, USA

    Xun Zhou

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Chen, C.X. (2016). Spatio-temporal Query Languages. In: Shekhar, S., Xiong, H., Zhou, X. (eds) Encyclopedia of GIS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23519-6_1332-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23519-6_1332-2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-23519-6

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