Conceptual Modeling for Traditional and Spatio-Temporal Applications

From environmental management to land planning and geo-marketing, the number of application domains that may greatly benefit from using data enriched with spatio-temporal features is expanding very rapidly. Unfortunately, development of new spatio-temporal applications is hampered by the lack of conceptual design methods suited to cope with the additional complexity of spatio-temporal data. This book shows that a conceptual design approach for spatio-temporal databases is both feasible and easy to apprehend. The authors provide a detailed and comprehensive description of an approach that fills the gap between application conceptual requirements and system capabilities, covering both data modeling and data manipulation features. The ideas presented summarize several years of research on the characteristics and description of space, time, and perception. In addition to the authors' own data modeling approach, MADS (Modeling of Application Data with Spatio-temporal features), the book also surveys alternative data models and approaches that target support of spatio-temporal modeling.