Research in spatio-temporal databases has largely focused on extensions of access methods for the proper handling of time
changing spatial information. In this paper, we present the Multiversion Linear Quadtree (MVLQ), a spatio-temporal access
method based on Multiversion B-trees (MVBT) [2], embedding ideas from Linear Region Quadtrees [4]. More specifically, instead of storing independent numerical data having a different transaction-time each, for every consecutive
image we store a group of codewords that share the same transaction-time, whereas each codeword represents a spatial subregion.
Thus, the new structure may be used as an index mechanism for storing and accessing evolving raster images. We also conducted
a thorough experimentation using sequences of real and synthetic raster images. In particular, we examined the time performance
of temporal window queries, and provide results for a variety of parameter settings.
Research performed under the European Union’s TMR Chorochronos project, contract number ERBFMRX-CT96-0056 (DG12-BDCN).