The Temporal R-Tree

It’s a well-known fact that the new GIS applications need to keep track of temporal information. However, the most known spatial index structure, the RTree and its variants, does not preserve the MBRs evolution. A first but inefficient approach is to add one dimension to data space in order to store time. In this work, we propose an alternative approach: a new index structure called Temporal R-Tree that deals with spatiotemporal data. The Temporal RTree, or TR-Tree, allows the retrieving of present and past states of data. There is little data duplication, which is guaranteed by the block copying mechanism. The retrieving time is comparable to the original R-Tree.