Patent ID: 8296343

Claim:
A system for query processing, comprising: a computer system having at least one program for: receiving a spatial query, wherein the spatial query includes a first function, wherein the first function includes as an argument a second function comprising a timeSeriesToPath function, wherein the second function includes an input argument that identifies a set of temporal values for each of one or more objects, wherein the set of temporal values comprises timeseries data for an associated object and is defined with a start time and an end time, and wherein output of the second function is one or more spatial objects that each comprise a path object; for each record to process for the spatial query, invoking a module to process the second function for the selected record, wherein the second function is processed by: (i) retrieving the set of temporal values associated with a selected record that were identified in the second function specified in the spatial query; (ii) extracting geographic positions from the set of temporal values for each of the one or more objects, wherein the geographic positions comprise, for each time of a series of times in the retrieved set of temporal values, a longitude value and a latitude value; (iii) generating point objects from the geographic positions, wherein each of the point objects specifies, for each time of the series of times in the retrieved set of temporal values, the longitude value and the latitude value; and (iv) generating the one or more spatial objects from the point objects, wherein each of the one or more spatial objects includes one or more methods; and evaluating the spatial query by evaluating the first function against the one or more spatial objects that are returned as a result of evaluating the second function to output results.