Ralf Hartmut Güting is Professor of computer science at the University of Hagen, Germany. After a one-year visit to the IBM Almaden Research Center in 1985, extensible and spatial database systems became his major research interests. He is the author of two German textbooks on data structures/algorithms and on compilers and has published about 50 articles on computational geometry and database systems. He is an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems. Markus Schneider is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Florida and holds a doctoral degree in Computer Science from the University of Hagen, Germany. He is author of a monograph in the area of spatial databases and of a German textbook on implementation concepts for database systems, and has published about 40 articles on database systems. He is on the editorial board of GeoInformatica.

"This book represents a milestone in the synthesis of temporal and spatial database concepts and techniques. It unifies and organizes the existing research into a coherent whole and presents substantial new results and approaches in many areas. In each case it begins with what is known, then it introduces the new concepts in an abstract and general model, and then it translates the ideas into a pragmatic representation of data structures or SQL-like query language extensions. As such, the book makes both an excellent text and an excellent reference. It also takes you to the frontiers of our understanding, so it is a great point of departure for a new researcher who wants to advance this field." --from the foreword by Jim Gray, Microsoft Research

• IntroductionSpatio-Temporal Databases in the PastModeling and Querying Current MovementModeling and Querying History of MovementData Structures and Algorithms for Moving Objects TypesThe Constraint Database ApproachSpatio-Temporal Indexing.