The TI/R--Tree: a temporal--spatial access structure

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new indexing structure, called the TI/R-tree, which combines techniques used in temporal access structures with techniques used in spatial access structures to provide a suitable means for maintaining and retrieving the history of geographic data.The TI/R-tree uses features from both the time index [ElWK90, Kour94] and the R-tree [Gutt84]. It has a tree structure similar to the time index and maintains a set of linearly ordered indexing points on the time dimension. The leaf nodes of the TI/R-tree refer to logical buckets which are organized as incremental R-trees; that is, at certain time points only deltas are kept. This permits the reconstruction of R-trees at any time point by using a number of logical buckets.