Nikos Pelekis

Semantic trajectories modeling and analysis

Focus on movement data has increased as a consequence of the larger availability of such data due to current GPS, GSM, RFID, and sensors techniques. In parallel, interest in movement has shifted from raw movement data analysis to more application-oriented ways of analyzing segments of movement suitable for the specific purposes of the application. This trend has promoted semantically rich trajectories, rather than raw movement, as the core object of interest in mobility studies. This survey provides the definitions of the basic concepts about mobility data, an analysis of the issues in mobility data management, and a survey of the approaches and techniques for: (i) constructing trajectories from movement tracks, (ii) enriching trajectories with semantic information to enable the desired interpretations of movements, and (iii) using data mining to analyze semantic trajectories and extract knowledge about their characteristics, in particular the behavioral patterns of the moving objects. Last but not least, the article surveys the new privacy issues that arise due to the semantic aspects of trajectories.

Literature review of spatio-temporal database models

Recent efforts in spatial and temporal data models and database systems have attempted to achieve an appropriate kind of interaction between the two areas. This paper reviews the different types of spatio-temporal data models that have been proposed in the literature as well as new theories and concepts that have emerged. It provides an overview of previous achievements within the domain and critically evaluates the various approaches through the use of a case study and the construction of a comparison framework. This comparative review is followed by a comprehensive description of the new lines of research that emanate from the latest efforts inside the spatio-temporal research community.

Similarity Search in Trajectory Databases

Trajectory database (TD) management is a relatively new topic of database research, which has emerged due to the explosion of mobile devices and positioning technologies. Trajectory similarity search forms an important class of queries in TD with applications in trajectory data analysis and spatiotemporal knowledge discovery. In contrast to related works which make use of generic similarity metrics that virtually ignore the temporal dimension, in this paper we introduce a framework consisting of a set of distance operators based on primitive (space and time) as well as derived parameters of trajectories (speed and direction). The novelty of the approach is not only to provide qualitatively different means to query for similar trajectories, but also to support trajectory clustering and classification mining tasks, which definitely imply a way to quantify the distance between two trajectories. For each of the proposed distance operators we devise highly parametric algorithms, the efficiency of which is evaluated through an extensive experimental study using synthetic and real trajectory datasets.

Nearest neighbor search on moving object trajectories

With the increasing number of Mobile Location Services (MLS), the need for effective k-NN query processing over historical trajectory data has become the vehicle for data analysis, thus improving existing or even proposing new services. In this paper, we investigate mechanisms to perform NN search on R-tree-like structures storing historical information about moving object trajectories. The proposed branch-and-bound algorithms vary with respect to the type of the query object (stationary or moving point) as well as the type of the query result (continuous or not). We also propose novel metrics to support our search ordering and pruning strategies. Using the implementation of the proposed algorithms on a member of the R-tree family for trajectory data (the TB-tree), we demonstrate their scalability and efficiency through an extensive experimental study using synthetic and real datasets.

Algorithms for Nearest Neighbor Search on Moving Object Trajectories

Nearest Neighbor (NN) search has been in the core of spatial and spatiotemporal database research during the last decade. The literature on NN query processing algorithms so far deals with either stationary or moving query points over static datasets or future (predicted) locations over a set of continuously moving points. With the increasing number of Mobile Location Services (MLS), the need for effective k-NN query processing over historical trajectory data has become the vehicle for data analysis, thus improving existing or even proposing new services. In this paper, we investigate mechanisms to perform NN search on R-tree-like structures storing historical information about moving object trajectories. The proposed (depth-first and best-first) algorithms vary with respect to the type of the query object (stationary or moving point) as well as the type of the query result (historical continuous or not), thus resulting in four types of NN queries. We also propose novel metrics to support our search ordering and pruning strategies. Using the implementation of the proposed algorithms on two members of the R-tree family for trajectory data (namely, the TB-tree and the 3D-R-tree), we demonstrate their scalability and efficiency through an extensive experimental study using large synthetic and real datasets.

Clustering uncertain trajectories

Knowledge discovery in Trajectory Databases (TD) is an emerging field which has recently gained great interest. On the other hand, the inherent presence of uncertainty in TD (e.g., due to GPS errors) has not been taken yet into account during the mining process. In this paper, we study the effect of uncertainty in TD clustering and introduce a three-step approach to deal with it. First, we propose an intuitionistic point vector representation of trajectories that encompasses the underlying uncertainty and introduce an effective distance metric to cope with uncertainty. Second, we devise CenTra, a novel algorithm which tackles the problem of discovering the Centroid Trajectory of a group of movements taking into advantage the local similarity between portions of trajectories. Third, we propose a variant of the Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering algorithm, which embodies CenTra at its update procedure. Finally, we relax the vector representation of the Centroid Trajectories by introducing an algorithm that post-processes them, as such providing these mobility patterns to the analyst with a more intuitive representation. The experimental evaluation over synthetic and real world TD demonstrates the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach.

Building real-world trajectory warehouses

The flow of data generated from low-cost modern sensing technologies and wireless telecommunication devices enables novel research fields related to the management of this new kind of data and the implementation of appropriate analytics for knowledge extraction. In this work, we investigate how the traditional data cube model is adapted to trajectory warehouses in order to transform raw location data into valuable information. In particular, we focus our research on three issues that are critical to trajectory data warehousing: (a) the trajectory reconstruction procedure that takes place when loading a moving object database with sampled location data originated e.g. from GPS recordings, (b) the ETL procedure that feeds a trajectory data warehouse, and (c) the aggregation of cube measures for OLAP purposes. We provide design solutions for all these issues and we test their applicability and efficiency in real world settings.

Hermes – a framework for location-based data management

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate Hermes, a robust framework capable of aiding a spatio-temporal database developer in modeling, constructing and querying a database with dynamic objects that change location, shape and size, either discretely or continuously in time. Hermes provides spatio-temporal functionality to state-of-the-art Object-Relational DBMS (ORDBMS). The prototype has been designed as an extension of STAU [6], which provides data management infrastructure for historical moving objects, so as to additionally support the demands of real time dynamic applications (e.g. Location-Based Services – LBS). The produced type system is packaged and provided as a data cartridge using the extensibility interface of Oracle10g. The offspring of the above framework extends PL/SQL with spatio-temporal semantics. The serviceableness of the resulting query language is demonstrated by realizing queries that have been proposed in [9] as a benchmarking framework for the evaluation of LBS.

A Pattern Similarity Scheme for Medical Image Retrieval

In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for efficient content-based medical image retrieval, formalized according to the PAtterns for Next generation DAtabase systems (PANDA) framework for pattern representation and management. The proposed scheme involves block-based low-level feature extraction from images followed by the clustering of the feature space to form higher-level, semantically meaningful patterns. The clustering of the feature space is realized by an expectation-maximization algorithm that uses an iterative approach to automatically determine the number of clusters. Then, the 2-component property of PANDA is exploited: the similarity between two clusters is estimated as a function of the similarity of both their structures and the measure components. Experiments were performed on a large set of reference radiographic images, using different kinds of features to encode the low-level image content. Through this experimentation, it is shown that the proposed scheme can be efficiently and effectively applied for medical image retrieval from large databases, providing unsupervised semantic interpretation of the results, which can be further extended by knowledge representation methodologies.

Segmentation and Sampling of Moving Object Trajectories Based on Representativeness

Moving Object Databases (MOD), although ubiquitous, still call for methods that will be able to understand, search, analyze, and browse their spatiotemporal content. In this paper, we propose a method for trajectory segmentation and sampling based on the representativeness of the (sub)trajectories in the MOD. In order to find the most representative subtrajectories, the following methodology is proposed. First, a novel global voting algorithm is performed, based on local density and trajectory similarity information. This method is applied for each segment of the trajectory, forming a local trajectory descriptor that represents line segment representativeness. The sequence of this descriptor over a trajectory gives the voting signal of the trajectory, where high values correspond to the most representative parts. Then, a novel segmentation algorithm is applied on this signal that automatically estimates the number of partitions and the partition borders, identifying homogenous partitions concerning their representativeness. Finally, a sampling method over the resulting segments yields the most representative subtrajectories in the MOD. Our experimental results in synthetic and real MOD verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, also in comparison with other sampling techniques.