Towards the automatic selection of moving regions representation methods

Moving region is an abstraction used to represent the spatio-temporal behavior of real-world phenomena in database systems. The most common approach to model moving regions uses geometries to represent their position and shape at different times (observations), and interpolation functions to generate the evolution of the geometries between observations. Several region interpolation methods have been proposed in the databases literature, but as there is no suitable method for all use cases, users must select the most adequate algorithm to represent each region by visual inspection. This can be infeasible when dealing with large datasets. This paper presents the first steps towards a system that suggests which methods (and configurations) can generate representations fitting the requirements of a particular application. It includes an abstract specification of user-defined rules on the spatio-temporal evolution of moving regions to assess the suitability of region interpolation functions, a discussion on optimization strategies for efficient implementation of the rules and illustrative examples using real-world data to show how to use this approach to select the best methods to represent a spatio-temporal phenomena.