ILX: Intelligent "Location+X" Data Systems (Vision Paper)

Due to the ubiquity of mobile phones and location-detection devices, location data is being generated in very large volumes. Queries and operations that are performed on location data warrant the use of database systems. Despite that, location data is being supported in data systems as an afterthought. Typically, relational or NoSQL data systems that are mostly designed with non-location data in mind get extended with spatial or spatiotemporal indexes, some query operators, and higher level syntactic sugar in order to support location data. The ubiquity of location data and location data services calls for systems that are solely designed and optimized for the efficient support of location data. This paper envisions designing intelligent location+X data systems, ILX for short, where in ILX, location is treated as a first-class citizen type. ILX is tailored with location data as the main data type (location-first). Because location data is typically augmented with other data types X, e.g., graphs, text data, click streams, annotations, etc., ILX needs to be extensible to support other data types X along with location. This paper envisions the main features that ILX should support, some research challenges related to realizing and supporting ILX.