MEOS

MEOS (Mobility Engine, Open Source) is a C library and its associated API for manipulating temporal and spatiotemporal data. It is the core component of MobilityDB, an open source geospatial trajectory data management & analysis platform built on top of PostgreSQL and PostGIS.

MEOS extends the ISO 19141:2008 standard (Geographic information — Schema for moving features) for representing the change of non-spatial attributes of features. It also takes into account the fact that when collecting mobility data it is necessary to represent “temporal gaps”, that is, when for some period of time no observations were collected due, for instance, to signal loss.

MEOS is heavily inspired by a similar library called GEOS (Geometry Engine, Open Source) — hence the name. A first version of the MEOS library written in C++ has been proposed by Krishna Chaitanya Bommakanti. However, due to the fact that MEOS codebase is actually a subset of MobilityDB codebase, which is written in C and in SQL, the current version of the library allows us to evolve both programming environments simultaneously.

MEOS aims to be the base library on which other projects can be built. For example, the following projects are built on top of MEOS:

• PyMEOS is a Python binding to MEOS using CFFI
• MobilityDB is a PostgreSQL extension that enables storing and manipulating the temporal types provided by MEOS.

Other projects can built on top of MEOS, for example, Java or C# drivers for MEOS or implementing MEOS on other DBMSs such as MySQL.