Representation, Visualization and Querying of Sea Turtle Migrations Using the MLPQ Constraint Database System SEMERE WOLDEMARIAM and PETER Z. REVESZ Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of Nebraska-Lincoln Lincoln, NE 68588-0115 USA revesz@cse.unl.edu http://cse.unl.edu/~revesz Abstract: - Animal migration is one of the areas biologists actively investigate in order to gain a better understanding of animal behavior. In general, the representation, visualization and querying of the observed animal migration data poses many challenges. This paper describes a novel approach to solving these challenges using the MLPQ constraint database system. Our modeling of the animal migration problem and specific software implementation using the MLPQ constraint database system provides an easy to understand and use scientific tool for biologists as is demonstrated on a test case of migration data for Atlantic Ocean sea turtles. The migration data include the position, latitude and longitude of the sea turtles as reported to satellites at certain time intervals. The migration observational data are interpolated and converted into a continuous movement data that are represented within a constraint database that can also animate and query the movement of the sea turtles. Key-Words: -Animation, constraint databases, migration, moving objects, spatio-temporal interpolation, turtle. 1 Introduction Animal migration is one of the most observed phenomena in biology because it is an important part of animal behavior [1]. Archie Carr [2] mentions an incident regarding sea turtles told to him by a captain of a turtle fishermen's boat in the Cayman Islands. According to the captain, a boat filled with sea turtles captured in their feeding area around northern Nicaragua, was shipped to Florida. Around the coast of Florida the boat capsized. The turtles were marked, customarily with the fishermen's initials, and to the surprise of the fishermen the turtles got back to where they were captured initially. More recently, Lohmann, et al. [1] have studied hatchling and migrating juvenile loggerhead (Caretta caretta) and green (Chelonia mydas) sea turtles. These juvenile turtles originate from the east coast of the USA. They show strong homing behavior, that is, they usually return to their feeding sites after migration. The representation, visualization and querying of the animal migration data, and in general moving objects data, currently still poses many challenges [5]. This paper describes a novel approach to solving these challenges using the MLPQ constraint database system [6], which was developed at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. It is an advanced implementation of the constraint database model that was proposed by Kanellakis et al. [3]. This rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the original data source and our data curation method. Section 3 outlines a constraint database solution. Section 4 presents the main results and analysis. Finally, Section 5 presents some discussion of the results and gives some conclusions. 2 Data Source and Curation We obtained Atlantic Ocean sea turtle migration data from Prof. Lohmann at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill [1]. The data used are the latitude and longitude of the boundaries of the US states [7], the geographical span of the United States [8] and the tracked latitude and longitude location of three sea turtles during their migration in the Atlantic Ocean. The United States map is used to give a perspective of the movement of the sea turtles relative to the US coast in the Atlantic Ocean. WSEAS TRANSACTIONS on COMPUTERS Semere Woldemariam, Peter Z. Revesz E-ISSN: 2224-2872 116 Volume 16, 2017