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Trajectory

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of GIS

  • 81 Accesses

Synonyms

Moving points

Definition

Representation of a time dependent position observed over some period of time. Usually represented as a polyline in a 3D (2D + time) space for an object moving in the 2D plane.

Main Text

Trajectories describe complete histories of movement; they are stored in moving objects databases, sometimes called trajectory databases in the literature. When operations are included, a trajectory corresponds to a value of a moving point data type. Queries of databases containing trajectories can be formulated using moving object languages. When uncertainty about an object's precise position is taken into account, an uncertain trajectory [3] results which can be viewed as a kind of cylindrical volume in the 2D + time space. There exists much work on indexing trajectories [2]. Querying for trajectories similar to a given one is also an important research area [1].

Cross References

Moving Object Languages

Spatio-temporal Data Types

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Recommended Reading

  1. Chen, L., Özsu, M.T., Oria, V.: Robust and fast similarity search for moving object trajectories. Proc. ACM SIGMOD Conf., Baltimore, Maryland, USA, pp. 491–502 (2005)

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  2. Mokbel, M.F., Ghanem, T.M., Aref, W.G.: Spatio-temporal access methods. Bull. of the TC on Data Engineering 26(2), 40–49 (2003)

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  3. Trajcevski, G., Wolfson, O., Hinrichs K., Chamberlain, S.: Managing uncertainty in moving objects databases. ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) 29(3), 463–507 (2004)

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fakultät für Mathematik und Informatik, Fernuniversität Hagen, Hagen, Germany

    Ralf Hartmut Güting

Authors
  1. Ralf Hartmut Güting
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Shashi Shekhar (McKnight Distinguished University Professor) (McKnight Distinguished University Professor)

  2. Management Science and Information Systems Department, Rutgers Business School Newark and New Brunswick Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Newark, NJ, 07102, USA

    Hui Xiong (Assistant Professor) (Assistant Professor)

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag

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Güting, R. (2008). Trajectory. In: Shekhar, S., Xiong, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of GIS. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35973-1_1402

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