Oporto: A Realistic Scenario Generator for Moving Objects

The spatio-temporal database research community has just started to investigate benchmarking issues. On the one hand we would rather have a benchmark that is representative of real world applications, in order to verify the expressiveness of proposed models. On the other hand, we would like a benchmark that offers a sizeable workload of data and query sets, which could obviously stress the strengths and weaknesses of a broad range of data access methods.

At the moment, we are able to provide a spatio-temporal data sets generator, a first step towards a full benchmark for the large real world application field of "smoothly" moving objects with few or no restrictions in motion. The driving application is the modelling of fishing ships where the ships go in the direction of the most attractive shoals of fish while trying to avoid storm areas. Fishes are themselves attracted by plankton areas. Ships are moving points, plankton or storm areas are regions with fixed centre but moving shape and shoals are moving regions. The specification is written in such a way that the users can easily adjust generation model parameters.

If you are concerned with benchmarking issues on spatio-temporal application you can ask for:

1. Downloading the Oporto generator

A compressed Zip file including the data sets generator (an MS-Windows / MS-DOS executable program), an example of the parameters file and a Release notes document.

2. Downloading a Visualisation tool

A compressed zip file including a Java JDK 1.1.6 application for visualisation of the generated data sets as well as real data sets. The application includes a Release notes document.

1. Experimenting the visualisation tool

To learn more about the visualisation tool using firstly a very small example (default) then, pressing the "define source files" button, using one of two "realistically" generated data sets: (g1s.dat, g1m.dat) or (g2s.dat, g2m.dat).

Because of Java applets, it is fully recommended to use Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or, at least Netscape Communicator 4.06 (it definitively doesn't work with Netscape 3.01!)

For more details please read articles referenced below or have a look to the DEXA99 presentation.

• Jean-Marc Saglio and José Moreira, " Oporto : A Realistic Scenario Generator for Moving Objects” (Extended version). To be published in GeoInformatica. 

• Jean-Marc Saglio and José Moreira, " Oporto: A Realistic Scenario Generator for Moving Objects". In Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Database & Expert Systems Applications, IEEE Computer Society, Florence, Italy, 1-3 September, August 30-31, 1999, pp. 426-432, ISBN 0-7695-0281-4.