Abstract: With the development of mobile computing and wireless communication technology in recent years, the spatio-temporal databases have been widely applied in traffic control and global position. A great deal of spatio-temporal indices were proposed for supporting spatio-temporal query and managing massive spatio-temporal objects efficiently.Firstly, summarized the spatio-temporal indices and drew, the evolvement graph, introduced the spatio-temporal query types, then divided the spatio-temporal indices into four types including past, current, future and complete tense according to time, and two types including moving point and moving area according to space, based on the categories expatiated the spatio-temporal indices,finally discussed the directions for further work.

Key words: Spatio-temporal index, Spatio-temporal database, Spatio-temporal query, Index