Toward Extensible Spatio-Temporal Databases: An Approach Based on User-Defined Aggregates

The need for spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal databases is ubiquitous and touches several application domains, including geographical information systems, autonomous navigation, tracking, medical imaging, and many others. To answer this need, database researchers have proposed many approaches that cover a wide spectrum of data models and query languages: a very incomplete list include [7, 15, 3, 11]. The number and variety of alternative solutions proposed reflect the complexity of technical problems and the diversity of applications and requirements encountered in the field, whereby a solution proposed for a certain spatio-temporal application might not satisfy the requirements of another. To solve this problem, we propose an approach whereby the primitives built in the system can be further customized and extended by the end-users via the query language itself —native extensibility— rather than the writing and importation of foreign functions defined in an external procedural language.

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