  Trajectory-based spatiotemporal entity linking is to match the same moving
object in different datasets based on their movement traces. It is a
fundamental step to support spatiotemporal data integration and analysis. In
this paper, we study the problem of spatiotemporal entity linking using
effective and concise signatures extracted from their trajectories. This
linking problem is formalized as a k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) query on the
signatures. Four representation strategies (sequential, temporal, spatial, and
spatiotemporal) and two quantitative criteria (commonality and unicity) are
investigated for signature construction. A simple yet effective dimension
reduction strategy is developed together with a novel indexing structure called
the WR-tree to speed up the search. A number of optimization methods are
proposed to improve the accuracy and robustness of the linking. Our extensive
experiments on real-world datasets verify the superiority of our approach over
the state-of-the-art solutions in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.
