August 24, 2007 – The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi is awarding Dr. Abdelguerfi a contract for research into Mining Large Spatio-Temporal Data Sets over Spatial Networks. The $307,037 research contract is effective August 23, 2007.

The US Navy is often tasked with knowledge discovery in large spatio-temporal databases. Spatio-temporal data has been gaining prominence in database applications, partly because technology has increased our ability to assemble very large sets of spatio-temporal data. As a result, knowledge discovery within large spatio-temporal datasets will be an important task in military and homeland security applications. However, spatio-temporal data is often difficult to handle due to its spatiality and temporality dimensions.

This project will develop a set of spatio temporal data mining primitives custom designed to operate on a spatial network and that are capable of expressing most data mining algorithms. The project will investigate the suitability of the metric tree as a network indexing scheme to facilitate the implementation of the above data mining primitives. Additional deliverables include a proof of concept implementation of a system for performing knowledge discovery of data within a spatio temporal network.