About Us ...

Our group is a database research group at FernUniversität Hagen, Germany, led by Prof. Dr. Ralf Hartmut Güting. This group focuses on specialized database technologies for non-standard data types, especially for moving objects data, like the trajectories of vehicles, pedestrians or animals, as well as changing areas like spilling oil, diffusing radiation etc. The group has studied the moving objects database (MOD) since the mid-nineties, and has in fact contributed to establishing this field of research by proposing some fundamental data models for moving objects [1, 2, 3].

The group has also developed over many years the SECONDO system, an open-source extensible database system that can systematically process non-standard data. In particular, it contains extensions for the moving objects data models mentioned above and is one of very few prototypes capable of analyzing large sets of moving objects trajectories. This has been demonstrated especially in the development of the so-called BerlinMOD benchmark [4] where large and scalable data sets of moving objects can be created in a simulation approach and MO database systems can be tested through a set of benchmark queries.

In recent years, along with the popularity of positioning equipments and various location-based services, the scales of different moving objects data sets become extremely large. It is obvious that also in this area scalability can only be achieved by introducing some kind of parallel computation on many computers. We are therefore working already for some time on an approach to enhance SECONDO with parallel processing technologies and use it to process a large amount of moving objects data in a cluster composed by tens or hundreds of computers. Here the proposed Parallel SECONDO is the result of this work.

[1] R.H. Güting, M.H. Böhlen, M. Erwig, C.S. Jensen, N.A. Lorentzos, M. Schneider, and M. Vazirgiannis, A Foundation for Representing and Querying Moving Objects. ACM Transactions on Database Systems 25:1 (2000), 1-42.

[2] R.H. Güting, V.T. de Almeida, and Z. Ding, Modeling and Querying Moving Objects in Networks. VLDB Journal 15:2 (2006), 165-190.

[3] R.H. Güting, M. Schneider: Moving Objects Databases. Morgan Kaufmann 2005.

[4] C. Düntgen, T. Behr, and R.H. Güting, BerlinMOD: A Benchmark for Moving Object Databases. The VLDB Journal 18:6 (2009), 1335-1368.