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Reviewer: Raphael M. Malyankar

In recent years, we have seen the widespread use of technologies for accurate location determination and monitoring, electronic navigation, and wireless communications, together with lightweight and inexpensive mobile phones and devices for tagging goods and vehicles for automatic identification and electronic navigation. The resulting amount of spatial trajectory data has led to a multitude of new applications that maintain, display, and analyze such data. This book is a focused collection addressing various data storage, access, and processing problems that are special to and significant in this domain. The book's goal is to cover fundamental issues as well as selected advanced topics. It is intended to provide a firm foundation in the core concepts-using tutorials on approaches and solution techniques for general problems in trajectory indexing, search, and data mining-and the use of the techniques in common application areas. The target audience includes researchers, graduate students, and professionals working on problems that use trajectory databases. Real-time navigation, collision avoidance, unmanned and remotely controlled vehicles, geographic data processing and storage, and similar problems are not in the scope of this volume. The focus is on land-based data and applications; the unique features of air, space, and marine trajectory problems are not covered. Beginning with preprocessing and filtering, the topics progress through indexing and retrieval to more specific problem areas. The first part of this book provides introductory material and describes the fundamental computational issues. This part consists of two chapters on data reduction, filtering, and the storage and querying of trajectory data. The second, much longer part discusses more specific computational problems and the techniques applicable to them. Many topics are covered in this part, ranging from modeling uncertainty and querying uncertain data to privacy, trajectory patterns, activity recognition, location estimation when satellite navigation systems like global positioning systems (GPS) cannot be used, road traffic routing, and data mining for social networks. The chapters are written as tutorials by different academics and researchers, and are intended to address a class of problems in this domain. The level of exposition is suitable for this purpose, and is generally equivalent to that of a graduate or upper-level college text. Advanced details obviously had to be curtailed to keep the length of the book manageable and appropriate for its purpose and audience. For those who need details, references for further reading are provided at the end of each chapter. The use of mathematical formalisms is limited to the extent necessary, and appropriate diagrams are provided. The book lacks an index; while citations and references are provided, a few partial entries have crept into the lists of references. Trajectory data generation, acquisition, storage, and processing utilize a wide spectrum of technologies with a multitude of applications, and are appropriate subjects for a handbook addressing the various problems in depth. As a focused tutorial, this book fills a niche. Overall, this is a very timely and informative work, which should be particularly useful to readers who are relatively new to the subject. Online Computing Reviews Service