

Glossary
Here is a list of common phrases used by spatiotemporal developers and practitioners.
Spatiotemporal Glossary
Entity
An entity is any object that sends data such as an individual with mobile phone, vehicle wih GPS tracker, shipping container or parcel with tracking number, or IoT sensor. The platform assumes that the user wants to model unique and groups of entities as they move (or track movement) through space over time. Each entity has a unique identifier such as mobile phone number, vehicle registration number plate or machine serial number.
Instance
These are self-contained repositories for your data containing a table of columns for ID, Latitude, Longtitude, Altitude, a timestamp and optional payload of additional information, such as measurement taken.
Observation
An entity such as a GPS tracker will send its position every few seconds, sometimes with telemetry data. These records are called recordings or observations. The platform can ingest millions of observations a second, subject to the available network bandwidth and local disk I/O throughput.
History
If an entity ID has multiple observations, the set of data points is referred to as the entity's 'history'.
Polygon query
Create a polygon around a geographical area of interest, such as a building, shopping mall, bridge, road or border, to retrieve all entities (and history of those entities) in the polygon during the timeframe specified. A bounding box query does the same but is limited to a simple 4-sided shape with 2 longtitude and 2 latitude co-ordinates.
See the Developers page for examples
See ExamplesMethods
API Overview and methods/Insert adds a new observation. The user specifies entity ID comma, time, position and payload (optional additional datapoints)
/entities
retrieves all unique entities with an option to filter by time range
/count
retrieves total count of observations stored with an option to filter by time range
/entities/history
retrieves all observations for an entity with an option to filter by time range
/polygon/history
retrieves all observations within a polygon with an option to filter by time range
/polygon/count
retrieves total count of observations within a polygon with an option to filter by time range
/polygon/entities
retrieves all unique entities within a polygon with an option to filter by time range
/bounding-box/history
retrieves all observations within a bounding box with an option to filter by time range
/bounding-box/count
retrieves total count of observations within a bounding box with an option to filter by time range
/bounding-box/entities
retrieves all unique entities within a bounding box with an option to filter by time range