Semantic Trajectory Knowledge Discovery: A Promising Way to Extract Meaningful Patterns from Spatiotemporal Data

Abstract

Spatiotemporal data mining studies the field of discovering interesting patterns from large spatiotemporal databases. Although these databases generate a huge volume of data daily from satellite images and mobile sensors like GPS, among these data we find first spatiotemporal and geographical data; secondly, the trajectories browsed by moving objects in some time intervals. Combination of these types of data leads to producing semantic trajectory data. Enriching trajectories with semantic geographical information leads to ease queries, analysis, and mining, in order to give more meaning to behaviors potentially extracted from trajectories. Therefore, applying mining techniques on semantic trajectories continue to prove to be a success story in discovering useful and nontrivial behavioral patterns of moving objects. The purpose of this paper is to make an overview of spatiotemporal knowledge discovery (STKD) and techniques recently used to extract knowledge from spatiotemporal data based on analysis of recent literature. Then leading towards a deeper analysis about semantic trajectory knowledge discovery as a specified field from STKD that integrates trajectory sample points with geographical data before applying mining techniques in order to extract behavioral knowledge from semantic trajectories which can be more useful and significant for the application users.