RxSpatial: the reactive spatial library

Abstract

The spatial libraries that have been developed by Microsoft, IBM and Oracle have substantially changed the capabilities of geospatial computing. These libraries implement several functionalities that include intersection, distance, and area for various geospatial objects. These libraries came out to address a wealth of use cases that were challenging in that era. As time goes by, GPS devices and location-aware mobile technologies increased the demand for geospatial computing, in general, and for real time geostreaming, in particular. Existing commercial spatial libraries were originally designed to support operations on stationary objects with limited or no capabilities for moving objects. In this paper, we introduce the RxSpatial library, a real time reactive spatial library for spatiotemporal stream query processing. RxSpatial provides, (1) a front-end, which is a programming interface for developers who are familiar with the Microsoft. NET Reactive framework and the Microsoft SQL Server Spatial Library, and (2) a back-end for processing spatial operations in a streaming fashion. RxSpatial provides the programming convenience at the front end and the query processing efficiency at the back end.