A taxonomy for moving object queries in spatial databases

• This study explains the variety of queries in moving objects databases.
• The movement patterns and the new raised queries of the moving objects databases.
• This taxonomy shows the targeted queries of the current moving objects data structures.

In the past decade, many works have focused on the development of moving object database indexing and querying. Most of those works have concentrated on the common spatial queries which are used with static objects as well. However, moving objects have different features from static objects which may lead to a variety of queries. Therefore, it is important to understand the full spectrum of moving object queries, even before starting to build an index structure for such objects. The aim of this paper is to provide a complete picture of the capabilities of moving object queries. Thus motivated, in this paper we propose a taxonomy of moving object queries, comprising five perspectives: (i) Location perspective, (ii) Motion perspective, (iii) Object perspective, (vi) Temporal perspective and (v) Patterns perspective. These give an overall view of what moving object queries are about. In this work, each perspective is described and examples are given.