Design and creation of spatiotemporal databases

Abstract

The project proposal submitted to eScience call, to which a fellowship of a Masters (M.Sc.) is requested, has the objective to develop a platform (on the internet) to collaboratively map the history of São Paulo during 1870-1940. The proposal shall deal with historical urban data. Such data sets represent the evolution of urban spatial locations over time, that is, are spatiotemporal data sets. Thus, the computational platform proposed in this project has to deal with such kind of information. In Geoinformatics, there is no consensus on how to model, store and handle spatiotemporal information in computational systems. The Masters student shall study and propose a model to store historical urban data in a Spatial Database Systems (Spatial DBMS). Spatial DBMS are extensions of traditional object-relational database management systems to deal with vector spatial information in compliance with the OGC Simple Feature Access (SFA) specification. Example of Spatial DBMS are PostGIS and Oracle Spatial. The idea is to extend the OGC SFA specification to support spatiotemporal information. Besides, the Masters student shall develop a TerraView GIS plugin to allow users to create and add spatiotemporal data sets in a Spatial DBMS, based on the model that will be proposed. In order to achieve this, the Masters student shall: (a) conduct a critical literature review on spatiotemporal data models and temporal GIS; (b) look into existing open source GIS and technologies for spatiotemporal database handling; (c) propose a spatiotemporal database model to store historical urban data sets in a Spatial DBMS; (d) develop a TerraView GIS plugin for spatiotemporal database, based on the model proposed in (c). (AU)