ITR: Collaborative Research: Real-time Capture, Management and Reconstruction of Spatio-Temporal Events

随着嵌入式处理器、低成本传感器技术和无线通信技术的进步，有关现实世界及其活动的各种类型的信息正在产生前所未有的数量。很多信息本质上是时空的；关于分散在空间和时间中的物体，并与彼此及其周围环境相互作用和交流。促进实时捕获、存储、处理、显示和分析生成的信息的基础设施将真正彻底改变各种应用程序领域。将受益于这项技术的领域包括航空电子设备、地面交通、商业应用（如航运和运输）、应急响应和救灾行动、物理现象（如天气和风暴跟踪）、森林火灾跟踪、动物/鸟类的迁徙模式、指挥和控制、智能环境等。上述领域的应用需要对空间和时间上的对象/事件/现象进行实时监控、跟踪和分析。这种传感器丰富的通信和信息基础设施的一个组成部分是数据库管理技术，该技术允许无缝访问分散在存储、通信和处理单元层次结构中的信息——从数据来源的传感器设备到存储用于分析和挖掘的生成信息的大型数据库。本研究将探索下一代数据库管理系统技术，为高度分布和动态传感器丰富的环境中的信息处理提供有效的支持。所采用的方法将是端到端的——也就是说，将对系统的各个方面进行研究，包括表示、数据建模、查询语言、数据结构、查询优化、查询处理、分布和并发访问。将开发一个原型数据库管理基础设施，支持高度动态的地理分散的时空数据，数据的多分辨率表示，并为可视化和分析提供有效的支持。

With the advances in embedded processors, low cost sensor technologies, and wireless communication, unprecedented amounts of diverse types of information about the real world and its activities are being generated. Much of the information is spatio-temporal in nature; concerning objects dispersed in space and time, and interacting and communicating with each other and their surroundings. An infrastructure that facilitates real-time capture, storage, processing, display, and analysis of the information generated will truly revolutionize a wide variety of application domains. Examples of domains that will benefit from this technology include avionics, ground traffic, commercial applications such as ship-ping and transportation, emergency response and disaster relief operations, physical phenomenon such as weather and storm tracking, forest fire tracking, migration patterns of animals/birds, command and control, smart environments, etc. Applications in the above domains require real-time monitoring, tracking and analysis of objects/events/phenomena in space and time. An integral component of such sensor enriched communication and information infrastructure is a database management technology that allows seamless access to information dispersed across a hierarchy of storage, communication and processing units - from sensor devices, where data originates, to large data banks where the information generated is stored for analysis and mining. This research will explore next generation database management system technology that provides effective support for information processing in highly distributed and dynamic sensor-enriched environments. The approach taken will be end-to-end - that is, research will be conducted on all aspects of the system ranging from representation, data modeling, query languages, data structures, query optimization, query processing, distribution, and concurrent accesses. A prototype database management infrastructure that supports highly dynamic geographically dispersed spatio-temporal data, multi-resolution representation of data, and provides effective support for visualization and analysis will be developed.