Database Support for Situational Awareness
Iosif Lazaridis, Sharad Mehrotra, Kriengkrai Porkaew · 2006
Abstract. Providing database support for interactive 3D Visualization and Situational Awareness (SA) is one of the keys to making such systems scale to the complexity of real-world scenarios. It is desirable that SA systems be highly realistic and intuitive to use. From a database perspective these requirements translate into (i) support for large amount of heterogeneous spatio-temporal data (to provide a convincing virtual environment, approximating the complexity of reality), (ii) support for highly dynamic situations in which the data may change frequently, (iii) support for mechanisms to deal with inherent imprecision in the underlying information, and, (iv) powerful query interface that allows users to pose varied and interesting queries that are answered with minimum time delay. In this chapter, we outline emerging research results in the field, especially in the context of the SATURN project, pointing to their direct applicability to the Situational Awareness task. We describe techniques for the representation of dynamic and mobile objects and their integration into a database system by reviewing appropriate indexing and query processing techniques. We also deal with spatial aggregate queries and present new techniques to compute their answers in a time-critical environment. 1.