The partial sequenced route query with traveling rules in road networks

In modern geographic information systems, route search represents an important class of queries. In route search related applications, users may want to define a number of traveling rules (traveling preferences) when they plan their trips. However, these traveling rules are not considered in most existing techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial query type, the multi-rule partial sequenced route (MRPSR) query, which enables efficient trip planning with user defined traveling rules. The MRPSR query provides a unified framework that subsumes the well-known trip planning query (TPQ) and the optimal sequenced route (OSR) query. The difficulty in answering MRPSR queries lies in how to integrate multiple choices of points-of-interest (POI) with traveling rules when searching for satisfying routes. We prove that MRPSR query is NP-hard and then provide three algorithms by mapping traveling rules to an activity on vertex network. Afterwards, we extend all the proposed algorithms to road networks. By utilizing both real and synthetic POI datasets, we investigate the performance of our algorithms. The results of extensive simulations show that our algorithms are able to answer MRPSR queries effectively and efficiently with underlying road networks. Compared to the Light Optimal Route Discoverer (LORD) based brute-force solution, the response time of our algorithms is significantly reduced while the distances of the computed routes are only slightly longer than the shortest route.     

Access Structures for Angular Similarity Queries

Angular similarity measures have been utilized by several database applications to define semantic similarity between various data types such as text documents, time-series, images, and scientific data. Although similarity searches based on Euclidean distance have been extensively studied in the database community, processing of angular similarity searches has been relatively untouched. Problems due to a mismatch in the underlying geometry as well as the high dimensionality of the data make current techniques either inapplicable or their use results in poor performance. This brings up the need for effective indexing methods for angular similarity queries. We first discuss how to efficiently process such queries and propose effective access structures suited to angular similarity measures. In particular, we propose two classes of access structures, namely, angular-sweep and cone-shell, which perform different types of quantization based on the angular orientation of the data objects. We also develop query processing algorithms that utilize these structures as dense indices. The proposed techniques are shown to be scalable with respect to both dimensionality and the size of the data. Our experimental results on real data sets from various applications show two to three orders of magnitude of speedup over the current techniques     

Discovery of probabilistic nearest neighbors in traffic-aware spatial networks

Travel planning and recommendation have received significant attention in recent years. In this light, we study a novel problem of discovering probabilistic nearest neighbors and planning the corresponding travel routes in traffic-aware spatial networks (TANN queries) to avoid potential time delay/traffic congestions. We propose and study four novel probabilistic TANN queries. Thereinto two queries target at minimizing the travel time, including a congestion-probability threshold query, and a time-delay threshold query, while another two travel-time threshold queries target at minimizing the potential time delay/traffic congestion. We believe that TANN queries are useful in many real applications, such as discovering nearby points of interest and planning convenient travel routes for users, and location based services in general. The TANN queries are challenged by two difficulties: (1) how to define probabilistic metrics for nearest neighbor queries in traffic-aware spatial networks, and (2) how to process these TANN queries efficiently under different query settings. To overcome these challenges, we define a series of new probabilistic metrics and develop four efficient algorithms to compute the TANN queries. The performances of TANN queries are verified by extensive experiments on real and synthetic spatial data.     

Optimizing complex queries based on similarities of subqueries

As database technology is applied to more and more application domains, user queries are becoming increasingly complex (e.g. involving a large number of joins and a complex query structure). Query optimizers in existing database management systems (DBMS) were not developed for efficiently processing such queries and often suffer from problems such as intolerably long optimization time and poor optimization results. To tackle this challenge, we present a new similarity-based approach to optimizing complex queries in this paper. The key idea is to identify similar subqueries that often appear in a complex query and share the optimization result among similar subqueries in the query. Different levels of similarity for subqueries are introduced. Efficient algorithms to identify similar queries in a given query and optimize the query based on similarity are presented. Related issues, such as choosing good starting nodes in a query graph, evaluating identified similar subqueries and analyzing algorithm complexities, are discussed. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed similarity-based approach is quite promising in optimizing complex queries with similar subqueries in a DBMS.     

Similarity query support in big data management systems

Similarity query processing is becoming increasingly important in many applications such as data cleaning, record linkage, Web search, and document analytics. In this paper we study how to provide end-to-end similarity query support natively in a parallel database system. We discuss how to express a similarity predicate in its query language, how to build indexes, how to answer similarity queries (selections and joins) efficiently in the runtime engine, possibly using indexes, and how to optimize similarity queries. One particular challenge is how to incorporate existing similarity join algorithms, which often require a series of steps to achieve a high efficiency, including collecting token frequencies, finding matching record id pairs, and reassembling result records based on id pairs. We present a novel approach that uses existing runtime operators to implement such complex join algorithms without reinventing the wheel; doing so positions the system to automatically benefit from future improvements to those operators. The approach includes a technique to transform a similarity join plan into an efficient operator-based physical plan during query optimization by using a template expressed largely in the system’s user-level query language; this technique greatly simplifies the specification of such a transformation rule. We use Apache AsterixDB, a parallel Big Data management system, to illustrate and validate our techniques. We conduct an experimental study using several large, real datasets on a parallel computing cluster to assess the similarity query support. We also include experiments involving three other parallel systems and report the efficacy and performance results.     

Keyword proximity search in XML trees

Recent works have shown the benefits of keyword proximity search in querying XML documents in addition to text documents. For example, given query keywords over Shakespeare's plays in XML, the user might be interested in knowing how the keywords cooccur. In this paper, we focus on XML trees and define XML keyword, proximity queries to return the (possibly heterogeneous) set of minimum connecting trees (MCTs) of the matches to the individual keywords in the query. We consider efficiently executing keyword proximity queries on labeled trees (XML) in various settings: 1) when the XML database has been preprocessed and 2) when no indices are available on the XML database. We perform a detailed experimental evaluation to study the benefits of our approach and show that our algorithms considerably outperform prior algorithms and other applicable approaches.     

Voronoi-based multi-level range search in mobile navigation

Due to the universality and importance of range search queries processing in mobile and spatial databases as well as in geographic information system (GIS), numerous approaches on range search algorithms have been proposed in recent years. But ordinary range search queries focus only on a specific type of point objects. For queries which require to retrieve objects of interest locating in a particular region, ordinary range search could not get the expected results. In addition, most existing range search methods need to perform a searching on each road segments within the pre-defined range, which decreases the performance of range search. In this paper, we design a weighted network Voronoi diagram and propose a high-performance multilevel range search query processing that retrieves a set of objects locating in some specified region within the searching range. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithm runs very efficiently and outperforms its main competitor.     

Adaptive similarity search for the retrieval of rare events from large time series databases

Improving the recall of information retrieval systems for similarity search in time series databases is of great practical importance. In the manufacturing domain, these systems are used to query large databases of manufacturing process data that contain terabytes of time series data from millions of parts. This allows domain experts to identify parts that exhibit specific process faults. In practice, the search often amounts to an iterative query–response cycle in which users define new queries (time series patterns) based on results of previous queries. This is a well-documented phenomenon in information retrieval and not unique to the manufacturing domain. Indexing manufacturing databases to speed up the exploratory search is often not feasible as it may result in an unacceptable reduction in recall. In this paper, we present a novel adaptive search algorithm that refines the query based on relevance feedback provided by the user. Additionally, we propose a mechanism that allows the algorithm to self-adapt to new patterns without requiring any user input. As the search progresses, the algorithm constructs a library of time series patterns that are used to accurately find objects of the target class. Experimental validation of the algorithm on real-world manufacturing data shows, that the recall for the retrieval of fault patterns is considerably higher than that of other state-of-the-art adaptive search algorithms. Additionally, its application to publicly available benchmark data sets shows, that these results are transferable to other domains.     

空间数据库中的线段k近邻查询研究

K近邻查询是空间数据库中的重要查询之一,k近邻查询在内容的相似性检索、模式识别、地理信息系统中有重要应用。针对现有k近邻查询都是基于点查询的情况,提出基于平面线段的k近邻查询,查找线段集中给定查询点的k个最近线段。给出基于Voronoi图的线段k近邻查询算法及给出相关定理和证明。该算法通过线段Voronoi图的邻接特性找到一个候选集,然后从中找到最终结果。通过随机数据的实验证明,所提算法明显优于线性扫描算法和基于R树的k近邻查询算法。     

Spatial skyline queries: exact and approximation algorithms

As more data-intensive applications emerge, advanced retrieval semantics, such as ranking and skylines, have attracted the attention of researchers. Geographic information systems are a good example of an application using a massive amount of spatial data. Our goal is to efficiently support exact and approximate skyline queries over massive spatial datasets. A spatial skyline query, consisting of multiple query points, retrieves data points that are not father than any other data points, from all query points. To achieve this goal, we present a simple and efficient algorithm that computes the correct results, also propose a fast approximation algorithm that returns a desirable subset of the skyline results. In addition, we propose a continuous query algorithm to trace changes of skyline points while a query point moves. To validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm, we provide an extensive empirical comparison between our algorithms and the best known spatial skyline algorithms from several perspectives.     

Query by video clip

Typical digital video search is based on queries involving a single shot. We generalize this problem by allowing queries that involve a video clip (say, a 10-s video segment). We propose two schemes: (i) retrieval based on key frames follows the traditional approach of identifying shots, computing key frames from a video, and then extracting image features around the key frames. For each key frame in the query, a similarity value (using color, texture, and motion) is obtained with respect to the key frames in the database video. Consecutive key frames in the database video that are highly similar to the query key frames are then used to generate the set of retrieved video clips. (ii) In retrieval using sub-sampled frames, we uniformly sub-sample the query clip as well as the database video. Retrieval is based on matching color and texture features of the sub-sampled frames. Initial experiments on two video databases (basketball video with approximately 16,000 frames and a CNN news video with approximately 20,000 frames) show promising results. Additional experiments using segments from one basketball video as query and a different basketball video as the database show the effectiveness of feature representation and matching schemes.     

Fragment oriented molecular shapes

Molecular shape is an important concept in drug design and virtual screening. Shape similarity typically uses either alignment methods, which dynamically optimize molecular poses with respect to the query molecular shape, or feature vector methods, which are computationally less demanding but less accurate. The computational cost of alignment can be reduced by pre-aligning shapes, as is done with the Volumetric-Aligned Molecular Shapes (VAMS) method. Here, we introduce and evaluate fragment oriented molecular shapes (FOMS), where shapes are aligned based on molecular fragments. FOMS enables the use of shape constraints, a novel method for precisely specifying molecular shape queries that provides the ability to perform partial shape matching and supports search algorithms that function on an interactive time scale. When evaluated using the challenging Maximum Unbiased Validation dataset, shape constraints were able to extract significantly enriched subsets of compounds for the majority of targets, and FOMS matched or exceeded the performance of both VAMS and an optimizing alignment method of shape similarity search.     

Location-aware query reformulation for search engines

Query reformulation, including query recommendation and query auto-completion, is a popular add-on feature of search engines, which provide related and helpful reformulations of a keyword query. Due to the dropping prices of smartphones and the increasing coverage and bandwidth of mobile networks, a large percentage of search engine queries are issued from mobile devices. This makes it possible to improve the quality of query recommendation and auto-completion by considering the physical locations of the query issuers. However, limited research has been done on location-aware query reformulation for search engines. In this paper, we propose an effective spatial proximity measure between a query issuer and a query with a location distribution obtained from its clicked URLs in the query history. Based on this, we extend popular query recommendation and auto-completion approaches to our location-aware setting, which suggest query reformulations that are semantically relevant to the original query and give results that are spatially close to the query issuer. In addition, we extend the bookmark coloring algorithm for graph proximity search to support our proposed query recommendation approaches online, and we adapt an A* search algorithm to support our query auto-completion approach. We also propose a spatial partitioning based approximation that accelerates the computation of our proposed spatial proximity. We conduct experiments using a real query log, which show that our proposed approaches significantly outperform previous work in terms of quality, and they can be efficiently applied online.     

An efficient mechanism for processing similarity search queries in sensor networks

The similarity search problem has received considerable attention in database research community. In sensor network applications, this problem is even more important due to the imprecision of the sensor hardware, and variation of environmental parameters. Traditional similarity search mechanisms are both improper and inefficient for these highly energy-constrained sensors. A difficulty is that it is hard to predict which sensor has the most similar (or closest) data item such that many or even all sensors need to send their data to the query node for further comparison. In this paper, we propose a similarity search algorithm (SSA), which is a novel framework based on the concept of Hilbert curve over a data-centric storage structure, for efficiently processing similarity search queries in sensor networks. SSA successfully avoids the need of collecting data from all sensors in the network in searching for the most similar data item. The performance study reveals that this mechanism is highly efficient and significantly outperforms previous approaches in processing similarity search queries.     

移动对象的动态反向k最近邻研究

反向最近邻查询是空间数据库中最重要的算法之一。传统的反向最近邻查询方法主要是针对静态对象的查询,随着无线通讯和定位技术的快速发展,移动对象发出的查询请求成为新的研究热点。该文将TPR-tree作为算法的索引结构,并提出了基于矩形框的对角线的修剪策略,将半平面修剪策略进行改进,给出了移动对象的动态反向k最近邻的查询方案。     

Monochromatic and bichromatic ranked reverse boolean spatial keyword nearest neighbors search

Recently, Reverse k Nearest Neighbors (RkNN) queries, returning every answer for which the query is one of its k nearest neighbors, have been extensively studied on the database research community. But the RkNN query cannot retrieve spatio-textual objects which are described by their spatial location and a set of keywords. Therefore, researchers proposed a RSTkNN query to find these objects, taking both spatial and textual similarity into consideration. However, the RSTkNN query cannot control the size of answer set and to be sorted according to the degree of influence on the query. In this paper, we propose a new problem Ranked Reverse Boolean Spatial Keyword Nearest Neighbors query called Ranked-RBSKNN query, which considers both spatial similarity and textual relevance, and returns t answers with most degree of influence. We propose a separate index and a hybrid index to process such queries efficiently. Experimental results on different real-world and synthetic datasets show that our approaches achieve better performance.     

基于语义相似度的Web数据库不精确查询方法

为了解决普通用户对于Web数据库的不精确查询问题,提出了一种基于语义相似度的Web数据库不精确查询方法。对于一个给定查询,该方法首先在查询历史中找出一个(或若干)与其相似度高于给定放松阈值的查询,然后从数据库中找出与这些查询相匹配的元组作为当前查询的不精确查询的结果,最后将这些查询结果按其对初始查询的满足程度进行排序。实验结果表明,提出的不同查询之间的语义相似度评估方法性能稳定、评估结果合理,不精确查询方法具有较高的查全率和排序准确性。     

Optimization and evaluation of shortest path queries

We investigate the problem of how to evaluate efficiently a collection of shortest path queries on massive graphs that are too big to fit in the main memory. To evaluate a shortest path query efficiently, we introduce two pruning algorithms. These algorithms differ on the extent of materialization of shortest path cost and on how the search space is pruned. By grouping shortest path queries properly, batch processing improves the performance of shortest path query evaluation. Extensive study is also done on fragment sizes, cache sizes and query types that we show that affect the performance of a disk-based shortest path algorithm. The performance and scalability of proposed techniques are evaluated with large road systems in the Eastern United States. To demonstrate that the proposed disk-based algorithms are viable, we show that their search times are significant better than that of main-memory Dijkstra's algorithm.     

Spatial inverse query processing

Traditional spatial queries return, for a given query object q, all database objects that satisfy a given predicate, such as epsilon range and k-nearest neighbors. This paper defines and studies inverse spatial queries, which, given a subset of database objects Q and a query predicate, return all objects which, if used as query objects with the predicate, contain Q in their result. We first show a straightforward solution for answering inverse spatial queries for any query predicate. Then, we propose a filter-and-refinement framework that can be used to improve efficiency. We show how to apply this framework on a variety of inverse queries, using appropriate space pruning strategies. In particular, we propose solutions for inverse epsilon range queries, inverse k-nearest neighbor queries, and inverse skyline queries. Furthermore, we show how to relax the definition of inverse queries in order to ensure non-empty result sets. Our experiments show that our framework is significantly more efficient than naive approaches.