A Framework for the Management of Deformable Moving Objects

There is an emergence of a growing number of applications and services based on spatiotemporal data in the most diverse areas of knowledge and human activity. The representation of the continuous evolution of moving regions, i.e., entities (or objects) whose position, shape and extent change continuously over time, is particularly challenging and the methods proposed in the literature to obtain such representation still present some issues. In this paper we present a framework for moving objects, in particular, moving regions, that uses the concept of mesh, i.e., a triangulated polygon, compatible triangulation and rigid interpolation methods to represent the continuous evolution of moving regions over time. We also present a spatiotemporal database extension for PostgreSQL that uses this framework and that allows to store moving objects data in a PostgreSQL database and to analyze and manipulate them using SQL. This extension can be smoothly integrated with PostGIS. Experiments show that our framework works with real data and provides a base for further work and investigation in this area.