In this article, we present a system that combines indoor positioning with a compression algorithm for trajectories in the context of a nursing home. Our aim is to gather and effectively represent the location of the residents and caregivers along time, while allowing for efficient access to those data. We briefly show the system architecture that enables the automatic tracking of user’s movements and consequently the gathering of their locations. Then, we present indRep, our compact representation to handle positioning data using grammar-based compression, and provide two basic operations that enable pseudorandom access to the data. Finally, we include experiments that show that indRep is competitive with well-known general-purpose compressors in terms of compression effectiveness and also provides fast access to the compressed data. We expect both features would enable exploitation functionalities even in computers with rather low computational resources.
We present a compact data structure to represent both the duration and length of homogeneous segments of trajectories from moving objects in a way that, as a data warehouse, it allows us to efficiently answer cumulative queries. The division of trajectories into relevant segments has been studied in the literature under the topic of Trajectory Segmentation. In this paper, we design a data structure to compactly represent them and the algorithms to answer the more relevant queries. We experimentally evaluate our proposal in the real context of an enterprise with mobile workers (truck drivers) where we aim at analyzing the time they spend in different activities. To test our proposal under higher stress conditions we generated a huge amount of synthetic realistic trajectories and evaluated our system with those data to have a good idea about its space needs and its efficiency when answering different types of queries.
We introduce a new technique for the efficient management of large sequences of multi-dimensional data, which takes advantage of regularities that arise in real-world datasets and supports different types of aggregation queries. More importantly, our representation is flexible in the sense that the relevant dimensions and queries may be used to guide the construction process, easily providing a space-time tradeoff depending on the relevant queries in the domain. We provide two alternative representations for sequences of multidimensional data and describe the techniques to efficiently store the datasets and to perform aggregation queries over the compressed representation. We perform experimental evaluation on realistic datasets, showing the space efficiency and query capabilities of our proposal.