Abstract
Spatial databases play a vital role in many applications such as Geographic Information
Systems (GIS), Computer Aided Design (CAD), Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI)
designs, Multimedia Information System (MMIS), and medicine and biological research.
Due to their importance, a large body of work has focused on efficiently computing
various spatial queries. A proximity based spatial query computes the results based on
the proximity (closeness) between the objects. Range queries, reverse k nearest neighbors
(RkNN) queries and k-closest pairs queries are some of the most important and well
studied proximity based spatial queries. In this thesis, we provide efficient solutions for
these queries under various settings. Below is a brief description of our contributions.
We present several algorithms to answer RkNN queries under different settings. More
specifically, we present an approach, called Lazy Updates, to continuously monitor RkNN
queries in Euclidean space as well as in spatial networks. Lazy Updates outperforms all
of the existing techniques in terms of both the computation cost and the communication
cost. We devise another technique, based on a novel concept of influence zone, to efficiently
compute both snapshot and continuous RkNN queries. The influence zone based
approach outperforms the existing techniques for both the snapshot and the continuous
RkNN queries. We also provide efficient solution for probabilistic RNN queries for the
case when the underlying data is uncertain.
We are the first to study the efficient monitoring of moving range queries over a set
of static data objects in Euclidean space and in spatial networks. We conduct a rigorous
theoretical analysis to show the effectiveness of our approach. The theoretical results are
verified by an extensive experimental study. The experimental results also demonstrate
that the proposed approach is close to optimal.
We are the first to present a unified framework to answer a broad class of top-k pairs
queries including the k-closest pairs queries, k-furthest pairs queries and their bichromatic
variants. We conduct a rigorous complexity analysis and show that the expected cost of
our proposed algorithms is optimal when the scoring function uses at most two attributes.