An Efficient Location Encoding Method Based on Hierarchical Administrative District

Due to the rapid development in mobile communication technologies, the usage of mobile devices such as cell phone or PDA becomes increasingly popular. 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 efficiently, it is necessary to be able to index and query well a large amount of spatio-temporal information of moving objects. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate how such location 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 is especially useful for monitoring traffic situation or tracing location of moving objects through approximate spatial queries.