A topological model of trajectories with road network space

Abstract

Spatiotemporal topological semantic information has attracted a lot of attention recently when exploring high-level human movement features in geographic contexts. Although topological semantics between a trajectory and individual spatial objects have been studied extensively, few studies have focused on movements in the specific context of spatial infrastructures, such as road networks. This study proposes a topological trajectory model that integrates the topological semantics of trajectory data related to road networks and regions in a unified framework. The proposed model considers key points during a trajectory and establishes a topological intersection model to describe key points’ semantics. With the topological semantics of the trajectory–road network obtained, the road network’s semantic relation is derived directly from the topological relation between road networks and regions. This model can intuitively express the semantic relations of the three elements, trajectory, road network, and region, which helps spatial queries and analyses of network constrained movements. A case study of real traffic data shows that more detailed semantic information can be obtained based on this model.