,
Silvia Nittel
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Continuous geospatial phenomena such as air quality, temperature, soil moisture, or noise evolve smoothly over space while potentially changing rapidly over time. They are increasingly observed through dense, real-time measurement streams from geosensor networks, mobile platforms, and live sensor infrastructures. While data stream engines provide low-latency processing over unbounded streams, they lack higher-level abstractions for spatially continuous phenomena. As a result, real-time field analysis is often implemented via ad-hoc pipelines that combine GIS tools, stream processing, and application-specific logic. In this paper we propose an analytical operator framework for streamed scalar fields. We derive a minimal, composable operator set building on principles of compact operator sets and dimensional reasoning over space, time, and theme. We demonstrate how analytics for streamed continuous phenomena are expressed through primitive operator compositions. The resulting framework provides a systematic basis for describing and implementing extensible stream-based, real-time field analytics.
@InProceedings{paul_et_al:LIPIcs.COSIT.2026.14,
author = {Paul, JJ and Nittel, Silvia},
title = {{An Operator Framework for Real-Time Analytics of Streamed Fields}},
booktitle = {17th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2026)},
pages = {14:1--14:22},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-438-3},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2026},
volume = {393},
editor = {Timpf, Sabine and Filomena, Gabriele and Kapaj, Armand and Zhu, Rui and Giudice, Nicholas A. and Manley, Ed},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2026.14},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-275584},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2026.14},
annote = {Keywords: Geostreaming, Spatiotemporal phenomena, Fields, Data streams, Real-time analytics, Operators, Algebra}
}