Range aggregate processing in spatial databases

A range aggregate query returns summarized information about the points falling in a hyper-rectangle (e.g., the total number of these points instead of their concrete ids). This paper studies spatial indexes that solve such queries efficiently and proposes the aggregate Point-tree (aP-tree), which achieves logarithmic cost to the data set cardinality (independently of the query size) for two-dimensional data. The aP-tree requires only small modifications to the popular multiversion structural framework and, thus, can be implemented and applied easily in practice. We also present models that accurately predict the space consumption and query cost of the aP-tree and are therefore suitable for query optimization. Extensive experiments confirm that the proposed methods are efficient and practical.     

Continuous aggregate nearest neighbor queries

This paper addresses the problem of continuous aggregate nearest-neighbor (CANN) queries for moving objects in spatio-temporal data stream management systems. A CANN query specifies a set of landmarks, an integer k, and an aggregate distance function f (e.g., min, max, or sum), where f computes the aggregate distance between a moving object and each of the landmarks. The answer to this continuous query is the set of k moving objects that have the smallest aggregate distance f. A CANN query may also be viewed as a combined set of nearest neighbor queries. We introduce several algorithms to continuously and incrementally answer CANN queries. Extensive experimentation shows that the proposed operators outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms by up to a factor of 3 and incur low memory overhead.     

一种有效的空间数据仓库区域聚集查询索引结构

空间数据仓库有效地支持对空间数据的管理和分析,提供更加全面的决策支持．讨论了一种有效的空间决策支持手段——空间区域聚集查询的实现．基于aggregate cubetree和aR—tree提出了一个可以有效地在空间维和非空间维上进行区域聚集查询的索引结构aCR-tree及其相关算法,并计算分析了查询算法的时间复杂度．与现有技术相比aCR-tree降低了存储代价和每次查询访问的节点数,通过实验证明,该索引结构可以提供较好的存储性能和查询性能．     

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.     

Density-based spatial keyword querying

With the rocket development of the Internet, WWW(World Wide Web), mobile computing and GPS (Global Positioning System) services, location-based services like Web GIS (Geographical Information System) portals are becoming more and more popular. Spatial keyword queries over GIS spatial data receive much more attention from both academic and industry communities than ever before. In general, a spatial keyword query containing spatial location information and keywords is to locate a set of spatial objects that satisfy the location condition and keyword query semantics. Researchers have proposed many solutions to various spatial keyword queries such as top-K keyword query, reversed kNN keyword query, moving object keyword query, collective keyword query, etc. In this paper, we propose a density-based spatial keyword query which is to locate a set of spatial objects that not only satisfies the query’s textual and distance condition, but also has a high density in their area. We use the collective keyword query semantics to find in a dense area, a group of spatial objects whose keywords collectively match the query keywords. To efficiently process the density based spatial keyword query, we use an IR-tree index as the base data structure to index spatial objects and their text contents and define a cost function over the IR-tree indexing nodes to approximately compute the density information of areas. We design a heuristic algorithm that can efficiently prune the region according to both the distance and region density in processing a query over the IR-tree index. Experimental results on datasets show that our method achieves desired results with high performance.     

空间区域聚集查询方法研究

为了提高空间数据仓库中区域聚集查询的响应性能,通过使用R_tree对空间维进行分层后,采用物化视图存储空间对象及R_tree中间结点的聚集信息,能够有效地支持空间维和非空间维上的区域聚集查询。     

Round-Eye: A system for tracking nearest surrounders in moving object environments

This paper presents “Round-Eye”, a system for tracking nearest surrounding objects (or nearest surrounders) in moving object environments. This system provides a platform for surveillance applications. The core part of this system is continuous nearest surrounder (NS) query that maintains views of the nearest objects at distinct angles from query points. This query differs from conventional spatial queries such as range queries and nearest neighbor queries as NS query considers both distance and angular aspects of objects with respect to a query point at the same time. In our system framework, a centralized server is dedicated (1) to collect location updates of both objects and queries, (2) to determine which NS queries are invalidated in presence of object/query location changes and corresponding result changes if any, and (3) to refresh the affected query answers. To enhance the system performance in terms of processing time and network bandwidth consumption, we propose various techniques, namely, safe region, partial query reevaluation, and incremental query result update. Through simulations, we evaluate our system with the proposed techniques over a wide range of settings.     

<Emphasis Type="BoldItalic">IRSJ</Emphasis>: incremental refining spatial joins for interactive queries in GIS

An increasing number of emerging web database applications deal with large georeferenced data sets. However, exploring these large data sets through spatial queries can be very time and resource intensive. The need for interactive spatial queries has arisen in many applications such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for efficient decision-support. In this paper, we propose a new interactive spatial query processing technique for GIS. We present a family of the Incremental Refining Spatial Join (IRSJ) algorithms that can be used to report incrementally refined running estimates for aggregate queries while simultaneously displaying the actual query result tuples of the data sets sampled so far. Our goal is to minimize the time until an acceptably accurate estimate of the query result is available (to users) measured by a confidence interval. Our approach enables more interactive data exploration and analysis. While similar work has been done in relational databases, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first work using this approach in GIS. We investigate and evaluate different sampling methodologies through extensive experimental performance comparisons. Experiments on both real and synthetic data show an order of magnitude response time improvement relative to the final answer obtained when using a full R-tree join. We also show the impact of different index structures on the performance of our algorithms using three known sampling methods.     

Distributed evaluation of network directory queries

We describe novel efficient techniques for the distributed evaluation of hierarchical aggregate selection queries over LDAP directory data, distributed across multiple autonomous directory servers. Such queries are useful for emerging applications like the directory enabled networks initiative. Our techniques follow the LDAP approach of distributed query evaluation by referrals, where each relevant server computes answers locally, and the LDAP client coordinates between directory servers. We make a conceptual separation between the identification of relevant servers and the distributed computation of answers. We focus on the challenging task of generating an efficient plan for evaluating hierarchical aggregate selection queries, which involves correlating directory entries across multiple servers. The key features of our plan are: 1) the network traffic consists of query answers, and auxiliary messages that depend only on the number of servers and the size of the query (not on the data size), 2) the coordination effort at the client is independent of the data size, and 3) potentially expensive server-to-server communication and coordination is avoided. We complement our analysis with experiments that show the robustness and scalability of our techniques for highly distributed directory query processing.     

Buffer queries

A class of commonly asked queries in a spatial database is known as buffer queries. An example of such a query is to "find house-power line pairs that are within 50 meters of each other." A buffer query involves two spatial data sets and a distance d. The answer to this query are pairs of objects, one from each input set, that are within distance d of each other. Given nonpoint spatial objects, evaluation of buffer queries could be a costly operation, even when the numbers of objects in the input data sets are relatively small. This paper addresses the problem of how to evaluate this class of queries efficiently. A fundamental problem with buffer query evaluation is to find an efficient algorithm for solving the minimum distance (miniDist) problem for lines and regions. An efficient minDist algorithm, which only requires a subsequence of segments from each object to be examined, is derived. Finding a fast minDist algorithm is the first step in evaluating a buffer query efficiently. It is observed that many, and sometimes even most, candidates can be proven in the answer without resorting to the relatively expensive minDist operation. A candidate is first evaluated with a least expensive technique-called O-object filtering. If it fails, a more costly operation, called 1-object filtering, is applied. Finally, if both filterings fail, the most expensive minDist algorithm is invoked. To show the effectiveness of the these techniques, they are incorporated into the well-known tree join algorithm and tested with real-life as well as artificial data sets. Extensive experiments show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing techniques by a wide margin in both execution time as well as IO accesses. More importantly, the performance gain improves drastically with the increase of distance values.     

Instance optimal query processing in spatial networks

The performance optimization of query processing in spatial networks focuses on minimizing network data accesses and the cost of network distance calculations. This paper proposes algorithms for network k-NN queries, range queries, closest-pair queries and multi-source skyline queries based on a novel processing framework, namely, incremental lower bound constraint. By giving high processing priority to the query associated data points and utilizing the incremental nature of the lower bound, the performance of our algorithms is better optimized in contrast to the corresponding algorithms based on known framework incremental Euclidean restriction and incremental network expansion. More importantly, the proposed algorithms are proven to be instance optimal among classes of algorithms. Through experiments on real road network datasets, the superiority of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated.     

Dynamic monitoring of optimal locations in road network databases

Optimal location (OL) queries are a type of spatial queries that are particularly useful for the strategic planning of resources. Given a set of existing facilities and a set of clients, an OL query asks for a location to build a new facility that optimizes a certain cost metric (defined based on the distances between the clients and the facilities). Several techniques have been proposed to address OL queries, assuming that all clients and facilities reside in an \(L_p\) space. In practice, however, movements between spatial locations are usually confined by the underlying road network, and hence, the actual distance between two locations can differ significantly from their \(L_p\) distance. Motivated by the deficiency of the existing techniques, this paper presents a comprehensive study on OL queries in road networks. We propose a unified framework that addresses three variants of OL queries that find important applications in practice, and we instantiate the framework with several novel query processing algorithms. We further extend our framework to efficiently monitor the OLs when locations for facilities and/or clients have been updated. Our dynamic update methods lead to efficient answering of continuous optimal location queries. We demonstrate the efficiency of our solutions through extensive experiments with large real data.     

SEE: a Spatial Exploration Environment based on adirect-manipulation paradigm

The need to provide effective tools for analyzing and querying spatial data is becoming increasingly important with the explosion of data in applications such as geographic information systems, image databases, CAD, and remote sensing. The SEE (Spatial Exploration Environment) is the first effort at applying direct-manipulation visual information seeking (VIS) techniques to spatial data analysis by visually querying as well as browsing spatial data and reviewing the visual results for trend analysis. The SEE system incorporates a visual query language (SVIQUEL) that allows users to specify the relative spatial position (both topology and direction) between objects using direct manipulation. The quantitative SVIQVEL sliders (S-sliders) are complemented by the qualitative active-picture-for-querying (APIQ) interface that allows the user to specify qualitative relative position queries. APIQ provides qualitative visual representations of the quantitative query specified by the S-sliders. This increases the utility of the system for spatial browsing and spatial trend discovery with no particular query in mind. The SVIQUEL queries are processed using a k-Bucket index structure specifically tuned for incremental processing of the multidimensional range queries that represent the class of queries that can be expressed by SVIQUEL. We have also designed a tightly integrated map visualization that helps to preserve the spatial context and a bar visualization that provides a qualitative abstraction of aggregates     

Optimal-Location-Selection Query Processing in Spatial Databases

This paper introduces and solves a novel type of spatial queries, namely, Optimal-Location-Selection (OLS) search, which has many applications in real life. Given a data object set D_A, a target object set D_B, a spatial region R, and a critical distance d_c in a multidimensional space, an OLS query retrieves those target objects in D_B that are outside R but have maximal optimality. Here, the optimality of a target object b in D_B located outside R is defined as the number of the data objects from D_A that are inside R and meanwhile have their distances to b not exceeding d_c. When there is a tie, the accumulated distance from the data objects to b serves as the tie breaker, and the one with smaller distance has the better optimality. In this paper, we present the optimality metric, formalize the OLS query, and propose several algorithms for processing OLS queries efficiently. A comprehensive experimental evaluation has been conducted using both real and synthetic data sets to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.     

Accuracy vs. Lifetime: Linear Sketches for Aggregate Queries in Sensor Networks

The in–network aggregation paradigm in sensor networks provides a versatile approach for evaluating aggregate queries. Traditional approaches need a separate aggregate to be computed and communicated for each query and hence do not scale well with the number of queries. Since approximate query results are sufficient for many applications, we use an alternate approach based on summary data–structures. We consider two kinds of aggregate queries: location range queries that compute the sum of values reported by sensors in a given location range, and value range queries that compute the number of sensors that report values in a given range. We construct summary data–structures called linear sketches, over the sensor data using in–network aggregation and use them to answer aggregate queries in an approximate manner at the base–station. There is a trade–off between accuracy of the query results and lifetime of the sensor network that can be exploited to achieve increased lifetimes for a small loss in accuracy. Most commonly occurring sets of range queries are highly correlated and display rich algebraic structure. Our approach takes full advantage of this by constructing linear sketches that depend on queries. Experimental results show that linear sketching achieves significant improvements in lifetime of sensor networks for only a small loss in accuracy of the queries. Further, our approach achieves more accurate query results than the other classical techniques using Discrete Fourier Transform and Discrete Wavelet Transform. This work was supported in part by NASA under Cooperative Agreement NCC5–315.     

The Farthest Spatial Skyline Queries

Pareto-optimal objects are favored as each of such objects has at least one competitive edge against all other objects, or “not dominated”. Recently, in the database literature, skyline queries have gained attention as an effective way to identify such pareto-optimal objects. In particular, this paper studies the pareto-optimal objects in perspective of facility or business locations. More specifically, given data points P and query points Q in two-dimensional space, our goal is to retrieve data points that are farther from at least one query point than all the other data points. Such queries are helpful in identifying spatial locations far away from undesirable locations, e.g., unpleasant facilities or business competitors. To solve this problem, we first study a baseline Algorithm TFSS and propose an efficient progressive Algorithm BBFS, which significantly outperforms TFSS by exploiting spatial locality. We also develop an efficient approximation algorithm to trade accuracy for efficiency. We validate our proposed algorithms using extensive evaluations over synthetic and real datasets.     

用于聚集值近似查询的基于密度的树索引结构

如何快速有效地对数据立方体上的聚集查询给出近似的回答,是数据挖掘和数据仓库研究领域中的核心问题之一。现有大多数聚集查询算法在同一个数据立方体上只能支持某种特定的而非多种类型的聚集查询。本文给出了一种新的框架AdenTS,即基于密度的自适应树结构,它可以回答同一数据立方体上的各类聚集查询,也提出了一些近似和启发式技术,改善了查询结果和精度。实验结果表明,这种方法在支持的查询种类和性能上是更好的。     

Optimizing in-network aggregate queries in wireless sensor networks for energy saving

This study proposes a method of in-network aggregate query processing to reduce the number of messages incurred in a wireless sensor network. When aggregate queries are issued to the resource-constrained wireless sensor network, it is important to efficiently perform these queries. Given a set of multiple aggregate queries, the proposed approach shares intermediate results among queries to reduce the number of messages. When the sink receives multiple queries, it should be propagated these queries to a wireless sensor network via existing routing protocols. The sink could obtain the corresponding topology of queries and views each query as a query tree. With a set of query trees collected at the sink, it is necessary to determine a set of backbones that share intermediate results with other query trees (called non-backbones). First, it is necessary to formulate the objective cost function for backbones and non-backbones. Using this objective cost function, it is possible to derive a reduction graph that reveals possible cases of sharing intermediate results among query trees. Using the reduction graph, this study first proposes a heuristic algorithm BM (standing for Backbone Mapping). This study also develops algorithm OOB (standing for Obtaining Optimal Backbones) that exploits a branch-and-bound strategy to obtain the optimal solution efficiently. This study tests the performance of these algorithms on both synthesis and real datasets. Experimental results show that by sharing the intermediate results, the BM and OOB algorithms significantly reduce the total number of messages incurred by multiple aggregate queries, thereby extending the lifetime of sensor networks.