A Survey on Spatio-temporal Data Analytics Systems

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews the ecosystem of spatial and spatio-temporal data analytics, including databases, processing infrastructures, and tools, highlighting recent developments and future directions in the field.

Contribution

It provides an up-to-date, holistic overview of the entire spatio-temporal data analytics ecosystem, which was lacking in previous surveys focused mainly on big data infrastructures.

Findings

Categorizes spatio-temporal data analytics systems into three main groups.

Highlights recent advancements in spatial databases, processing infrastructures, and tools.

Discusses future trends and importance of spatio-temporal data analytics.

Abstract

Due to the surge of spatio-temporal data volume, the popularity of location-based services and applications, and the importance of extracted knowledge from spatio-temporal data to solve a wide range of real-world problems, a plethora of research and development work has been done in the area of spatial and spatio-temporal data analytics in the past decade. The main goal of existing works was to develop algorithms and technologies to capture, store, manage, analyze, and visualize spatial or spatio-temporal data. The researchers have contributed either by adding spatio-temporal support with existing systems, by developing a new system from scratch for processing spatio-temporal data, or by implementing algorithms for mining spatio-temporal data. The existing ecosystem of spatial and spatio-temporal data analytics can be categorized into three groups, (1) spatial databases (SQL and NoSQL), (2) big spatio-temporal data processing infrastructures, and (3) programming languages and software tools for processing spatio-temporal data. Since existing surveys mostly investigated big data infrastructures for processing spatial data, this survey has explored the whole ecosystem of spatial and spatio-temporal analytics along with an up-to-date review of big spatial data processing systems. This survey also portrays the importance and future of spatial and spatio-temporal data analytics.