A Query Language for Mobility Data Mining

The technologies of mobile communications and ubiquitous computing pervade society. Wireless networks sense the movement of people and vehicles, generating large volumes of mobility data, such as mobile phone call records and GPS tracks. This data can produce useful knowledge, supporting sustainable mobility and intelligent transportation systems, provided that a suitable knowledge discovery process is enacted for mining this mobility data. In this paper, the authors examine a formal framework, and the associated implementation, for a data mining query language for mobility data, created as a result of a European-wide research project called GeoPKDD (Geographic Privacy-Aware Knowledge Discovery and Delivery). The authors discuss how the system provides comprehensive support for the Mobility Knowledge Discovery process and illustrate its analytical power in unveiling the complexity of urban mobility in a large metropolitan area, based on a massive real life GPS dataset.