Asset Tracking Model Summary
Asset tracking is a growing use case for spatial database systems, with performance requirements that differ from traditional use cases. Traditionally, spatial databases are loaded with data infrequently and queried frequently. Traditionally, spatial databases store information that can be indexed in two dimensions. Traditionally, spatial databases do not have to deal with rapidly growing data sets, or data sets with more than several million records.
Asset tracking turns all those assumption on their heads. Data comes in quickly and continuously. Data cover the same areas over and over, requiring indexing on time as well as space. Data continuously grow, and huge spatial tables need to be managed and queried.
A general model for asset tracking can encapsulate the requirements for:
- Maintaining up-to-date information about current and recent asset locations and properties.
- Maintaining historical information about asset locations and properties.
- Firing events when assets enter and leave spatio-temporal alarm regions.
- Managing the continuous growth of historical data through partitioning.
- Providing support functions for temporal operations.
This road map item would deliver:
- Data model
- Testing framework for performance
- Implementation documentation
- Temporal utility functions
- Example web-mapping configuration
- Data management scripts
Funding
This roadmap item is currently unfunded.
Add your support for this item by contacting us for a quote and discussion of the particular features you need.
Get a quote now!
Get a quote or read more about core development to add your support to a road-map item.
Other Roadmap Items
For GIS data, spatial partitioning indexes (quadtree, kd-tree) have been shown to be significantly faster than more general balanced indexes (r-tree). PostGIS currently uses an r-tree index. Adding SP-GiST (a generic API for partitioned indexes) to PostgreSQL will allow much faster spatial searching in PostGIS.
Client software, particularly software that does coordinate system reprojection, requires the extent of a layer in order to integrate it with other layers. Spatial databases are generally slow at returning that information.
The PostGIS spatial index currently splits pages based on longest edge. This results in trees that have sub-optimal spatial clustering in the branches, which in turn makes for sub-optimal clustering. A packed R-Tree would provide the highest performance clustering.