Evaluation of cardinal direction developments between moving points

Abstract

Recently, a wide range of applications like hurricane research, fire management, navigation systems, and transportation has shown increasing interest in managing and analyzing space and time-referenced objects, so-called moving objects, that continuously change their positions over time. In the same way as moving objects can change their location over time, the spatial relationships between them can change over time. An important class of spatial relationships are cardinal directions like north and southeast. In spatial databases and GIS, they characterize the relative directional position between static objects in space and are frequently used as selection and join criteria in spatial queries. Transferred to a spatiotemporal context, the simultaneous location change of different moving objects can imply a temporal evolution of their directional relationships, called development. The goal of this paper is to illustrate, explain, and formally define cardinal direction developments between two moving points.