MobilityDB

An open source geospatial trajectory data management & analysis platform

MobilityDB is a database management system for moving object geospatial trajectories, such as GPS traces. It adds support for temporal and spatio-temporal objects to the PostgreSQL database and its spatial extension PostGIS.

MobilityDB is developed by the Computer & Decision Engineering Department of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) under the direction of Prof. Esteban Zimányi. ULB is an OGC Associate Member and member of the OGC Moving Feature Standard Working Group (MF-SWG).

The MobilityDB project is managed by a steering committee.

You can find detailed explanations about MobilityDB and its use in various application scenarios in our texbook

• Mahmoud Sakr, Alejandro Vaisman, Esteban Zimányi
  Mobility Data Science: From Data to Insights
  Springer 2025

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-82636-8

A companion website contains the datasets used in the book alongside with the scripts allowing you to input these datasets in PostgreSQL and reproduce the use cases, visualizations, and exercises.

More information about MobilityDB, including publications, presentations, etc., can be found in the MobilityDB website.

Documentation

The pregenerated user and developer documentation can be found here.

To generate the documentation locally, refer to our documentation generation section

Benefits

• Compact geospatial trajectory data storage

• Rich mobility analytics

• Big data scale and performance

• Easy to use full SQL interface

• Compatible with the PostgreSQL ecosystem

  

• Compliant with the Moving Features standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

• Adopted by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) as a community project

• Database adapters to access MobilityDB from Python are provided by the PyMEOS package, supporting psycopg and asyncpg libraries.

• Data generator and benchmark tool based on the BerlinMOD benchmark. The data generator takes input data from Open Street Map and uses pgRouting to generate routes between pairs of source and target locations.

  • MobilityDB-BerlinMOD

• MOVE plugin to display the result of MobilityDB queries in QGIS

• An extensive workshop illustrating various usage scenarios of MobilityDB

Experimental Projects

These projects push the boundaries of MobilityDB and connect it with the PostgreSQL/PostGIS ecosystem.

Cloud

• MobilityDB-AWS: MobilityDB on Amazon Web Services
• MobilityDB-Azure: MobilityDB on Azure
• MobilityDB-GCP: MobilityDB on Google Cloud Platform

Visualization

• MobilityDeck: Integration of MobilityDB with deck.gl
• MobilityDB-Leaflet: Integration of MobilityDB with Leaflet
• MobilityOpenLayers: Integration of MobilityDB with OpenLayers
• MobilityQGIS: Integration of MobilityDB with QGIS

Public Transport

• MobilityDB-PublicTransport: Integration of MobilityDB with public transport standards such as GTFS and Netex
• MobilityDB-OpenTripPlanner: Integration of MobilityDB with public transport standards such as OpenTripPlanner

Mailing Lists

There are two mailing lists for MobilityDB hosted on OSGeo mailing list server:

• User mailing list: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mobilitydb-users
• Developer mailing list: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mobilitydb-dev

For general questions and topics about how to use MobilityDB, please write to the user mailing list.

Branches

• The master branch has the development of the next release.
• The stable-major.minor branches have the patch releases of the correspong major.minor release.

The complete list of releases is available here

Requirements

• Linux (other UNIX-like systems may work, but remain untested)
• CMake >= 3.12
• PostgreSQL 16 to 19 (the build stops with an explicit error outside that range)
• PostGIS >= 3.0
• PROJ >= 7.1
• JSON-C
• Development files for PostgreSQL, PostGIS, PROJ4, JSON-C

For example, you can build the following command to install all MobilityDB build dependencies for Debian-based systems using PostgreSQL 16 and PostGIS 3:

apt install build-essential cmake postgresql-server-dev-16 libproj-dev libjson-c-dev

On Fedora and other RPM-based distributions, the same dependencies are installed with the distribution packages, which already carry a supported PostgreSQL and PostGIS:

dnf install gcc gcc-c++ cmake make postgresql-server-devel postgis proj-devel json-c-devel

The optional families that -DALL=ON enables need two more packages, gdal-devel for the raster operators and h3-devel for the H3 index type.

Building & Installation

Here is the gist:

git clone https://github.com/MobilityDB/MobilityDB
mkdir MobilityDB/build
cd MobilityDB/build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

You should also set the following in postgresql.conf depending on the version of PostGIS you have installed (below we use PostGIS 3):

shared_preload_libraries = 'postgis-3'
max_locks_per_transaction = 128

If you do not preload the PostGIS library you will not be able to load the MobilityDB library and will get an error message such as the following one

ERROR:  could not load library "/usr/local/pgsql/lib/libMobilityDB-1.0.so": undefined symbol: ST_Distance

Notice that you can find the location of the postgresql.conf file as given next:

$ which postgres
/usr/local/pgsql/bin/postgres
$ ls /usr/local/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf
/usr/local/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf

As can be seen, the PostgreSQL binaries are in the bin subdirectory while the postgresql.conf file is in the data subdirectory.

Once MobilityDB is installed, it needs to be enabled in each database you want to use it in. In the example below we use a database named mobility.

createdb mobility
psql mobility -c "CREATE EXTENSION PostGIS"
psql mobility -c "CREATE EXTENSION MobilityDB"

Docker Container

Docker images with MobilityDB and all its dependencies are available here. These images are based on the official Postgres and Postgis docker images, please refer to them for more information.

If you have docker installed in your system you can run:

docker pull mobilitydb/mobilitydb
docker volume create mobilitydb_data
docker run --name mobilitydb -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=mysecretpassword \
  -p 25432:5432 -v mobilitydb_data:/var/lib/postgresql -d mobilitydb/mobilitydb
psql -h localhost -p 25432 -U postgres

The first command is to download the latest most up-to-date image of MobilityDB. The second command creates a volume container on the host, that we will use to persist the PostgreSQL database files outside of the MobilityDB container. The third command executes this binary image of PostgreSQL, PostGIS, and MobilityDB with the TCP port 5432 in the container mapped to port 25432 on the Docker host (user = postgres, db = postgres, pw=mysecretpassword). The fourth command is to connect to the database using psql.

Note that you can define the environment variable PGPASSWORD to avoid an interactive pw prompt.

PGPASSWORD=mysecretpassword psql -h localhost -p 25432 -U postgres

Issues

Please report any issues you may have.

Generating the Documentation

Pregenerated versions of the user and developer documentation can be found here.

User's Manual

You can generate the user's manual in HTML, PDF, and EPUB formats. The manual is generated in English and in other available languages (currently only Spanish). For this, it is necessary to specify appropriate options in the cmake command as follows:

• DOC_ALL: Generate in HTML, PDF, and EPUB formats
• DOC_HTML: Generate in HTML format
• DOC_PDF: Generate in PDF format
• DOC_EPUB: Generate in EPUB format
• LANG_ALL: Generate in all available languages
• ES: Generate the Spanish documentation

For example, the following command generates the documentation in all formats and in all languages.

cmake -D DOC_ALL=true -D LANG_ALL=true ..
make doc

As another example, the following command generates the English documentation in PDF.

cmake -D DOC_PDF=true ..
make doc

The resulting documentation will be generated in the doc directory of the build directory.

Developer's Documentation

You can generate the English developer's documentation in HTML format. For this, it is necessary to the option DOC_DEV in the cmake command as follows:

cmake -D DOC_DEV=true ..
make doc_dev

The resulting HTML documentation will be generated in the doxygen directory of the build directory.

Licenses

• MobilityDB code is provided under the PostgreSQL License.
• MobilityDB documentation is provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License 3.

Ackowledgements

The MobilityDB project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreements No 101070279 MobiSpaces and No 101093051 EMERALDS.