Benchmarking access methods for time-evolving regional data

In this paper we present a performance comparison of access methods for time-evolving regional data. Initially, we briefly review four temporal extensions of the Linear Region Quadtree: the Time-Split Linear Quadtree, the Multiversion Linear Quadtree, the Multiversion Access Structure for Evolving Raster Images and Overlapping Linear Quadtrees. These methods comprise a family of specialized access methods that can efficiently store and manipulate consecutive raster images. A new simpler implementation solution that provides efficient support for spatio-temporal queries referring to the past through these methods, is suggested. An extensive experimental space and time performance comparison of all the above access methods follows. The comparison is made under a common and flexible benchmarking environment in order to choose the best technique depending on the application and on the image characteristics. These experimental results show that in most cases the Overlapping Linear Quadtrees method is the best choice. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.