Adaptive Management of Multigranular Spatio-Temporal Object Attributes

In applications involving spatio-temporal modelling, granularities of data may have to adapt according to the evolving semantics and significance of data. In this paper we define ST2-ODMGe, a multigranular spatio-temporal model supporting evolutions, which encompass the dynamic adaptation of attribute granularities, and the deletion of attribute values. Evolutions are specified as Event - Condition - Action rules and are executed at run-time. The event, the condition, and the action may refer to a period of time and a geographical area. The evolution may also be constrained by the attribute values. The ability of dynamically evolving the object attributes results in a more flexible management of multigranular spatio-temporal data but it requires revisiting the notion of object consistency with respect to class definitions and access to multigranular object values. Both issues are formally investigated in the paper.