0000000000528315

AUTHOR

Nikos Mamoulis

Spatial joins

The spatial join is a popular operation in spatial database systems and its evaluation is a well-studied problem. This paper reviews research and recent trends on spatial join evaluation. The complexity of different data types, the consideration of different join predicates, the use of modern commodity hardware, and support for parallel processing open the road to a number of interesting directions for future research, some of which we outline in the paper.

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A Two-level Spatial In-Memory Index

Very large volumes of spatial data increasingly become available and demand effective management. While there has been decades of research on spatial data management, few works consider the current state of commodity hardware, having relatively large memory and the ability of parallel multi-core processing. In this work, we re-consider the design of spatial indexing under this new reality. Specifically, we propose a main-memory indexing approach for objects with spatial extent, which is based on a classic regular space partitioning into disjoint tiles. The novelty of our index is that the contents of each tile are further partitioned into four classes. This second-level partitioning not onl…

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Parallel In-Memory Evaluation of Spatial Joins

The spatial join is a popular operation in spatial database systems and its evaluation is a well-studied problem. As main memories become bigger and faster and commodity hardware supports parallel processing, there is a need to revamp classic join algorithms which have been designed for I/O-bound processing. In view of this, we study the in-memory and parallel evaluation of spatial joins, by re-designing a classic partitioning-based algorithm to consider alternative approaches for space partitioning. Our study shows that, compared to a straightforward implementation of the algorithm, our tuning can improve performance significantly. We also show how to select appropriate partitioning parame…

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Top-k String Similarity Joins

Top-k joins have been extensively studied in relational databases as ranking operations when every object has, among others, at least one ranking attribute. However, the focus has mostly been the case when the join attributes are of primitive data types (e.g., numerical values) and the join predicate is equality. In this work, we consider string objects assigned such ranking attributes or simply scores. Given two collection of string objects and a string similarity measure (e.g., the Edit distance), we introduce the top-k string similarity join () which returns k sufficiently similar pairs of objects with respect to a similarity threshold ϵ, which have the highest combined score computed by…

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A Two-layer Partitioning for Non-point Spatial Data

Non-point spatial objects (e.g., polygons, linestrings, etc.) are ubiquitous and their effective management is always timely. We study the problem of indexing non-point objects in memory. We propose a secondary partitioning technique for space-oriented partitioning indices (e.g., grids), which improves their performance significantly, by avoiding the generation and elimination of duplicate results. Our approach is novel and of a high impact, as (i) it is extremely easy to implement and (ii) it can be used by any space-partitioning index. We show how our approach can be used to boost the performance of spatial range queries. We also show how we can avoid performing the expensive refinement s…

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