An efficient location encoding method for moving objects using hierarchical administrative district and road network

Due to the rapid development in mobile communication technologies, the usage of mobile devices such as cell phone or PDA has increased significantly. As different devices require different applications, various new services are being developed to satisfy the needs. One of the popular services under heavy demand is the location-based service (LBS) that exploits the spatial information of moving objects per temporal changes. In order to support LBS well, in this paper, we investigate how spatio-temporal information of moving objects can be efficiently stored and indexed. In particular, we propose a novel location encoding method based on hierarchical administrative district information. Our proposal is different from conventional approaches where moving objects are often expressed as geometric points in two-dimensional space, (x, y). Instead, in ours, moving objects are encoded as one-dimensional points by both administrative district as well as road information. Our method becomes especially useful for monitoring traffic situation or tracing location of moving objects through approximate spatial queries.