Walid G. Aref

The proliferation of mobile phones and location-based services has given rise to an explosive growth in spatial data. To enable spatial data analytics, spatial data needs to be streamed into a data stream warehouse system that can provide real-time analytical results over the most recent and historical spatial data in the warehouse. Existing data stream warehouse systems are not tailored for spatial data. In this article, we introduce the STAR system. STAR is a distributed in-memory data stream warehouse system that provides low-latency and up-to-date analytical results over a fast-arriving spatial data stream. STAR supports both snapshot and continuous queries that are composed of aggregate functions and ad hoc query constraints over spatial, textual, and temporal data attributes. STAR implements a cache-based mechanism to facilitate the processing of snapshot queries that collectively utilizes the techniques of query-based caching (i.e., view materialization) and object-based caching. Moreover, to speed up processing continuous queries, STAR proposes a novel index structure that achieves high efficiency in both object checking and result updating. Extensive experiments over real datasets demonstrate the superior performance of STAR over existing systems.