Database system support for spatio-temporal aspects in scientific applications

Spatio-temporal data analysis plays an important role in many scientific applications like environmental epidemiology and public health. The authors' approach, STARS (Spatio-Temporal dAtabase system Realized with Shore), integrates spatio-temporal aspects in the persistent object system SHORE. STARS provides an object oriented query language to formulate spatio-temporal queries which can be processed by the prototypical system using an additional integrating access structure.