MobilityDB 1.3 is a major revision with respect to version 1.2. The most important change in version 1.3 was to enable new spatiotemporal types. While version 1.2 defined the spatiotemporal types tgeompoint (temporal geometry point), tgeogpoint (temporal geography point), and tnpoint (temporal network point), version 1.3 added the new types tgeometry (temporal geometry), tgeography (temporal geography), tcbuffer (temporal circular buffer), tpose (temporal pose), and trgeometry (temporal rigid geometry). At a conceptual level, all the spatiotemporal types are organized in the hierarchy depicted in Figure 7.1, “Hierarchy of spatiotemporal types in MobilityDB.”.

In order to enable the above, a refactoring of the code base was necessary. All the types provided by version 1.2 in addition to the new types tgeometry and tgeography are defined as core types and thus, are always included in the building process. Each one of the other spatiotemporal types can be included in the building process by setting its corresponding compilation flag. For example, when adding -DCBUFFER=1 the types built upon the cbuffer base type, that is cbuffer, cbufferset, and tcbuffer, will be included in the building process. The possibility to select the types to be included in the executable program is important in particular for stream processing, due to the limited capability of the edge devices. Please notice that the new types tcbuffer, tpose, and trgeometry are still in development and will be finalized in a forthcoming release.

In addition, the API of MobilityDB and MEOS was extended with new functionality and streamlined to improve usability. Finally, version 1.3 also enables the latest versions PostgreSQL 18 and PostGIS 3.6.0. For all these reasons, the binary format of the temporal types have changed from version 1.2 to 1.3 and thus a backup and restore is needed for migrating to the newer version 1.3 of MobilityDB.