ABSTRACT
This chapter explores potential methods of spatiotemporal data access, identifies the basic data groupings to be accessed and outlines the procedures needed to access them. It examines existing multidimensional data structures, considers their suitability for spatiotemporal systems and defines a taxonomy that separates access methods according to their operation. The chapter focuses on access patterns that are evidenced by the query traffic of an application, and explains four primitive query types namely, simple temporal query, temporal range query, simple spatiotemporal query, and spatiotemporal range query. ’Access methods’ have been interchangeably termed ‘indexing’ and ‘partitioning’ by the researchers. As with Frank’s strategy, clipped objects are transported to a different level of the file with different partitions. The unnested strategy translates the partitions at each level so objects that are clipped at a high level can fall to a lower level.
