Abstract
In many applications, the precise locations of moving objects are not needed. Not only are the exact coordinate locations of moving objects not needed, the exact coordinate locations may sometimes be distorted due to the inaccuracy of the tracking system. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient index structure for the moving objects in outdoor cellular space based on their regional aspects. The idea of the Topographical Outdoor (star) tree (or TO*-tree) is based on the adjacency between outdoor areas (or cells). The basic development in this approach is that it takes into account the differences between the outdoor cells. The idea is to differentiate the groupings of moving objects in high-density areas such as city centers, from those in other low-density areas such as suburbs. Also, the new method proposed in this approach includes the temporal aspect of the index, which allows the processing of temporal queries. The initial experiments suggest that the TO*-tree performs more efficiently and for less cost compared with the original topographical outdoor-tree.