SECONDO: A Platform for Moving Objects Database Research and for Publishing and Integrating Research Implementations

Databases supporting time dependent and continuously changing geometries, called moving ob- jects databases , have been studied for about 15 years. The field has been flourishing and there exist many hundreds, more likely thousands, of publications. However, very few of these results have made it into systems (research prototypes or commercial) and are available for practical use today. It is not that the publications are purely theoretical. In most cases data structures and algorithms have been proposed, implemented, and experimentally evaluated. However, whereas there exists a well established infrastructure for publishing research papers through journals and conferences, no such facilities exist for the publication of the related prototypical implementations. Hence imple- mentations are just done for experiments in the paper and then usually abandoned. This is highly unfortunate even for research, as future proposals of improved algorithms most often have to reim- plement the previous techniques they need to compare to. In this paper we describe an infrastructure for research in moving objects databases that addresses some of these problems. Essentially it allows researchers to implement their new techniques within a system context and to make them available for practical use to all readers of their papers and users of the system. The infrastructure consists of S ECONDO , an extensible database system into which a lot of moving object technology has been built already. It offers BerlinMOD, a benchmark to generate large sets of realistic moving object trajectories together with a comprehensive set of queries. Finally, it offers S ECONDO Plugins as a facility to publish new research implementations that anyone can merge with a standard S ECONDO distribution to have them run in a complete system context.