On Measuring Inconsistency in Spatio-Temporal Databases

Abstract

The problem of managing spatio-temporal data arises in many applications, such as location-based services, environmental monitoring, and geographic information systems. Often spatio-temporal data arising from such applications turn out to be inconsistent, i.e., representing an impossible situation in the real world. Several inconsistency measures have been proposed to quantify in a principled way inconsistency in classical knowledge bases. We start by showing how some of these measures carry over to spatio-temporal databases. Then, we define and investigate new measures that are particularly suitable for dealing with inconsistent spatio-temporal information because they explicitly take into account the spatial and temporal dimensions as well as the dimension concerning the identifiers of the monitored objects.