TEMPORAL, SPATIAL ,

GEOGRAPHIC &
MULTIMEDIA DATABASES
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TIME IN DATABASES
 While most databases tend to model reality at a point in
time (at the ``current'' time), temporal databases model
the states of the real world across time.
 Facts in temporal relations have associated times when
they are valid, which can be represented as a union of
intervals.
 The transaction time for a fact is the time interval
during which the fact is current within the database
system.
 In a temporal relation, each tuple has an associated
time when it is true; the time may be either valid time or
transaction time.
 A bi-temporal relation stores both valid and
transaction time.

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 TIME IN DATABASES (CONT.)
 Example of a temporal relation:

 Temporal query languages have been proposed to simplify

modeling of time as well as time related queries.
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TIME SPECIFICATION IN SQL-92
 date: four digits for the year (1--9999), two digits for the
month (1--12), and two digits for the date (1--31).
 time: two digits for the hour, two digits for the minute,
and two digits for the second, plus optional fractional
digits.
 timestamp: the fields of date and time, with six
fractional digits for the seconds field.
 Times are specified in the Universal Coordinated Time,
abbreviated UTC (from the French); supports time
with time zone.
 interval: refers to a period of time (e.g., 2 days and 5
hours), without specifying a particular time when this
period starts; could more accurately be termed a span.
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TEMPORAL QUERY LANGUAGES
 Predicates precedes, overlaps, and contains on time
intervals.
 Intersect can be applied on two intervals, to give a single
(possibly empty) interval; the union of two intervals may
or may not be a single interval.
 A snapshot of a temporal relation at time t consists of
the tuples that are valid at time t, with the time-interval
attributes projected out.
 Temporal selection: involves time attributes
 Temporal projection: the tuples in the projection
inherit their time-intervals from the tuples in the
original relation.
 Temporal join: the time-interval of a tuple in the result
is the intersection of the time-intervals of the tuples
from which it is derived. It intersection is empty, tuple is
discarded from join.
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TEMPORAL QUERY LANGUAGES (CONT.)
 Functional dependencies must be used with care:
adding a time field may invalidate  functional
dependency
 A temporal functional dependency x → Y
holds on a relation schema R if, for all legal
instances r of R, all snapshots of r satisfy the
functional dependency X →Y.
 SQL:1999 Part 7 (SQL/Temporal) is a proposed
extension to SQL:1999 to improve support of
temporal data.

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SPATIAL AND GEOGRAPHIC DATABASES

 Spatial databases store information related to spatial

locations, and support efficient storage, indexing and
querying of spatial data.
 Special purpose index structures are important for
accessing spatial data, and for processing spatial join
queries.
 Computer Aided Design (CAD) databases store design
information about how objects are constructed E.g.: designs
of buildings, aircraft, layouts of integrated-circuits
 Geographic databases store geographic information (e.g.,
maps): often called geographic information systems or GIS.

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REPRESENTED OF GEOMETRIC INFORMATION
 Various geometric constructs can be represented in a database in a
normalized fashion.
 Represent a line segment by the coordinates of its endpoints.
 Approximate a curve by partitioning it into a sequence of segments
 Create a list of vertices in order, or
 Represent each segment as a separate tuple that also carries with it the
identifier of the curve (2D features such as roads).
 Closed polygons
 List of vertices in order, starting vertex is the same as the ending vertex,
or
 Represent boundary edges as separate tuples, with each containing
identifier of the polygon, or
 Use triangulation — divide polygon into triangles
 Note the polygon identifier with each of its triangles.

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REPRESENTATION OF GEOMETRIC CONSTRUCTS

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REPRESENTATION OF GEOMETRIC INFORMATION (CONT.)

 Representation of points and line segment in 3-D

similar to 2-D, except that points have an extra z
component
 Represent arbitrary polyhedra by dividing them into
tetrahedrons, like triangulating polygons.
 Alternative: List their faces, each of which is a
polygon, along with an indication of which side of the
face is inside the polyhedron.

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DESIGN DATABASES
 Represent design components as objects (generally
geometric objects); the connections between the objects
indicate how the design is structured.
 Simple two-dimensional objects: points, lines, triangles,
rectangles, polygons.
 Complex two-dimensional objects: formed from simple
objects via union, intersection, and difference operations.
 Complex three-dimensional objects: formed from simpler
objects such as spheres, cylinders, and cuboids, by union,
intersection, and difference operations.
 Wireframe models represent three-dimensional surfaces
as a set of simpler objects.

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REPRESENTATION OF GEOMETRIC CONSTRUCTS

(a) Difference of cylinders (b) Union of cylinders

 Design databases also store non-spatial information

about objects (e.g., construction material, color, etc.)
 Spatial integrity constraints are important.
 E.g., pipes should not intersect, wires should not be too
close to each other, etc. 12
GEOGRAPHIC DATA

 Raster data consist of bit maps or pixel maps, in

two or more dimensions.
 Example 2-D raster image: satellite image of cloud
cover, where each pixel stores the cloud visibility in a
particular area.
 Additional dimensions might include the temperature
at different altitudes at different regions, or
measurements taken at different points in time.
 Design databases generally do not store raster
data.

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GEOGRAPHIC DATA (CONT.)
 Vector data are constructed from basic geometric
objects: points, line segments, triangles, and other
polygons in two dimensions, and cylinders, speheres,
cuboids, and other polyhedrons in three dimensions.
 Vector format often used to represent map data.
 Roads can be considered as two-dimensional and
represented by lines and curves.
 Some features, such as rivers, may be represented either as
complex curves or as complex polygons, depending on
whether their width is relevant.
 Features such as regions and lakes can be depicted as
polygons.

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APPLICATIONS OF GEOGRAPHIC DATA
 Examples of geographic data
 map data for vehicle navigation
 distribution network information for power, telephones,
water supply, and sewage
 Vehicle navigation systems store information about
roads and services for the use of drivers:
 Spatial data: e.g, road/restaurant/gas-station
coordinates
 Non-spatial data: e.g., one-way streets, speed limits,
traffic congestion
 Global Positioning System (GPS) unit - utilizes
information broadcast from GPS satellites to find
the current location of user with an accuracy of tens
of meters.
 increasingly used in vehicle navigation systems as well
as utility maintenance applications.

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SPATIAL QUERIES
 Nearness queries request objects that lie near a
specified location.
 Nearest neighbor queries, given a point or an object,
find the nearest object that satisfies given
conditions.
 Region queries deal with spatial regions. e.g., ask for
objects that lie partially or fully inside a specified
region.
 Queries that compute intersections or unions of
regions.
 Spatial join of two spatial relations with the location
playing the role of join attribute.

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SPATIAL QUERIES (CONT.)
 Spatial data is typically queried using a
graphical query language; results are also
displayed in a graphical manner.
 Graphical interface constitutes the front-end
 Extensions of SQL with abstract data types,
such as lines, polygons and bit maps, have been
proposed to interface with back-end.
 allows relational databases to store and retrieve
spatial information
 Queries can use spatial conditions (e.g. contains or
overlaps).
 queries can mix spatial and nonspatial conditions

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INDEXING OF SPATIAL DATA

 k-d tree - early structure used for indexing in multiple

dimensions.
 Each level of a k-d tree partitions the space into two.
 choose one dimension for partitioning at the root level of the
tree.
 choose another dimensions for partitioning in nodes at the next
level and so on, cycling through the dimensions.
 In each node, approximately half of the points stored in
the sub-tree fall on one side and half on the other.
 Partitioning stops when a node has less than a given
maximum number of points.
 The k-d-B tree extends the k-d tree to allow multiple
child nodes for each internal node; well-suited for
secondary storage.

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DIVISION OF SPACE BY A K-D TREE

 Each line in the figure (other than the outside box)

corresponds to a node in the k-d tree
 the maximum number of points in a leaf node has been set to
1.
 The numbering of the lines in the figure indicates the level
of the tree at which the corresponding node appears.
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DIVISION OF SPACE BY QUADTREES
Quadtrees
 Each node of a quadtree is associated with a rectangular region of space;
the top node is associated with the entire target space.
 Each non-leaf nodes divides its region into four equal sized quadrants
 correspondingly each such node has four child nodes corresponding to the four
quadrants and so on
 Leaf nodes have between zero and some fixed maximum number of points
(set to 1 in example).

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QUADTREES (CONT.)
 PR quadtree: stores points; space is divided based on
regions, rather than on the actual set of points stored.
 Region quadtrees store array (raster) information.
 A node is a leaf node is all the array values in the region that
it covers are the same. Otherwise, it is subdivided further
into four children of equal area, and is therefore an internal
node.
 Each node corresponds to a sub-array of values.
 The sub-arrays corresponding to leaves either contain just a
single array element, or have multiple array elements, all of
which have the same value.
 Extensions of k-d trees and PR quadtrees have been
proposed to index line segments and polygons
 Require splitting segments/polygons into pieces at
partitioning boundaries
 Same segment/polygon may be represented at several leaf nodes
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R-TREES
 R-trees are a N-dimensional extension of B+-trees,
useful for indexing sets of rectangles and other
polygons.
 Supported in many modern database systems, along
with variants like R+ -trees and R*-trees.
 Basic idea: generalize the notion of a one-dimensional
interval associated with each B+ -tree node to an
N-dimensional interval, that is, an N-dimensional
rectangle.
 Will consider only the two-dimensional case (N = 2)
 generalization for N > 2 is straightforward, although R-
trees work well only for relatively small N

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R TREES (CONT.)
 A rectangular bounding box is associated with each
tree node.
 Bounding box of a leaf node is a minimum sized rectangle
that contains all the rectangles/polygons associated with the
leaf node.
 The bounding box associated with a non-leaf node contains
the bounding box associated with all its children.
 Bounding box of a node serves as its key in its parent node (if
any)
 Bounding boxes of children of a node are allowed to overlap

 A polygon is stored only in one node, and the bounding

box of the node must contain the polygon
 The storage efficiency or R-trees is better than that of k-d
trees or quadtrees since a polygon is stored only once
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 EXAMPLE R-TREE
 A set of rectangles (solid line) and the bounding boxes (dashed line) of the
nodes of an R-tree for the rectangles. The R-tree is shown on the right.

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SEARCH IN R-TREES
 To find data items (rectangles/polygons) intersecting
(overlaps) a given query point/region, do the
following, starting from the root node:
 If the node is a leaf node, output the data items whose keys
intersect the given query point/region.
 Else, for each child of the current node whose bounding box
overlaps the query point/region, recursively search the
child
 Can be very inefficient in worst case since multiple
paths may need to be searched
 but works acceptably in practice.
 Simple extensions of search procedure to handle
predicates contained-in and contains

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MULTIMEDIA DATABASES
 To provide such database functions as indexing
and consistency, it is desirable to store
multimedia data in a database
 rather than storing them outside the database, in a
file system
 The database must handle large object
representation.
 Similarity-based retrieval must be provided by
special index structures.
 Must provide guaranteed steady retrieval rates
for continuous-media data.

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MULTIMEDIA DATA FORMATS
 Store and transmit multimedia data in compressed
form
 JPEG and GIF the most widely used formats for image
data.
 MPEG standard for video data use commonalties among
a sequence of frames to achieve a greater degree of
compression.
 MPEG-1 quality comparable to VHS video tape.
 stores a minute of 30-frame-per-second video and audio
in approximately 12.5 MB
 MPEG-2 designed for digital broadcast systems and
digital video disks; negligible loss of video quality.
 Compresses 1 minute of audio-video to approximately 17
MB.
 Several alternatives of audio encoding
 MPEG-1 Layer 3 (MP3), RealAudio, WindowsMedia
format, etc.
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CONTINUOUS-MEDIA DATA
 Most important types are video and audio data.
 Characterized by high data volumes and real-time
information-delivery requirements.
 Data must be delivered sufficiently fast that there are
no gaps in the audio or video.
 Data must be delivered at a rate that does not cause
overflow of system buffers.
 Synchronization among distinct data streams must be
maintained
 video of a person speaking must show lips moving
synchronously with the audio

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VIDEO SERVERS
 Video-on-demand systems deliver video from
central video servers, across a network, to
terminals
 Must guarantee end-to-end delivery rates
 Current video-on-demand servers are based on file
systems; existing database systems do not meet
real-time response requirements.
 Multimedia data are stored on several disks (RAID
configuration), or on tertiary storage for less
frequently accessed data.
 Head-end terminals - used to view multimedia data
 PCs or TVs attached to a small, inexpensive computer
called a set-top box.

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SIMILARITY-BASED RETRIEVAL
Examples of similarity based retrieval
 Pictorial data: Two pictures or images that are slightly
different as represented in the database may be
considered the same by a user.
 E.g., identify similar designs for registering a new trademark.
 Audio data: Speech-based user interfaces allow the user
to give a command or identify a data item by speaking.
 E.g., test user input against stored commands.
 Handwritten data: Identify a handwritten data item or
command stored in the database

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