The main purpose of spatio-temporal database systems is combining the spatial and temporal features of data. Almost all spatio-temporal applications—such as mobile communication systems, traffic control systems, and GIS with moving objects—have a common basis, which is the requirement to handle both space and time characteristics of the data. Similar to other data types, spatio-temporal data are required to be accurately modeled, structured, and queried efficiently. In this paper, we survey data models, related operations, data structures and access methods for spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal data types. These access methods basically are enhanced variations of the well-known R-tree.
