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Full-Text Articles in Databases and Information Systems

Thinking Spatial, Mohamed F. Mokbel Jul 2021

Thinking Spatial, Mohamed F. Mokbel

Journal of Spatial Information Science

The systems community in both academia and industry has tremendous success in building widely used general purpose systems for various types of data and applications. Examples include database systems, big data systems, data streaming systems, and machine learning systems. The vast majority of these systems are ill equipped in terms of supporting spatial data. The main reason is that system builders mostly think of spatial data as just one more type of data. Any spatial support can be considered as an afterthought problem that can be supported via on-top functions or spatial cartridges that can be added to the already …


Geometric Aspects And Auxiliary Features To Top-K Processing [Advanced Seminar], Kyriakos Mouratidis Jun 2016

Geometric Aspects And Auxiliary Features To Top-K Processing [Advanced Seminar], Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Top-k processing is a well-studied problem with numerous applications that is becoming increasingly relevant with the growing availability of recommendation systems and decision making software on PCs, PDAs and smart-phones. The objective of this seminar is twofold. First, we will delve into the geometric aspects of top-k processing. Second, we will cover complementary features to top-k queries that have a strong geometric nature. The seminar will close with insights in the effect of dimensionality on the meaningfulness of top-k queries, and interesting similarities to nearest neighbor search.


Fast Optimal Aggregate Point Search For A Merged Set On Road Networks, Weiwei Sun, Chong Chen, Baihua Zheng, Chunan Chen, Liang Zhu, Weimo Liu, Yan Huang Jul 2015

Fast Optimal Aggregate Point Search For A Merged Set On Road Networks, Weiwei Sun, Chong Chen, Baihua Zheng, Chunan Chen, Liang Zhu, Weimo Liu, Yan Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Aggregate nearest neighbor query, which returns an optimal target point that minimizes the aggregate distance for a given query point set, is one of the most important operations in spatial databases and their application domains. This paper addresses the problem of finding the aggregate nearest neighbor for a merged set that consists of the given query point set and multiple points needed to be selected from a candidate set, which we name as merged aggregate nearest neighbor(MANN) query. This paper proposes two algorithms to process MANN query on road networks when aggregate function is max. Then, we extend the algorithms …


Mixed Spatial And Nonspatial Problems In Location Based Services, Jaime Ballesteros Jun 2013

Mixed Spatial And Nonspatial Problems In Location Based Services, Jaime Ballesteros

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With hundreds of millions of users reporting locations and embracing mobile technologies, Location Based Services (LBSs) are raising new challenges. In this dissertation, we address three emerging problems in location services, where geolocation data plays a central role. First, to handle the unprecedented growth of generated geolocation data, existing location services rely on geospatial database systems. However, their inability to leverage combined geographical and textual information in analytical queries (e.g. spatial similarity joins) remains an open problem. To address this, we introduce SpsJoin, a framework for computing spatial set-similarity joins. SpsJoin handles combined similarity queries that involve textual and spatial …


Tree-Based Partition Querying: A Methodology For Computing Medoids In Large Spatial Datasets, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias, Spiros Papadimitriou Dec 2010

Tree-Based Partition Querying: A Methodology For Computing Medoids In Large Spatial Datasets, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias, Spiros Papadimitriou

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

Besides traditional domains (e.g., resource allocation, data mining applications), algorithms for medoid computation and related problems will play an important role in numerous emerging fields, such as location based services and sensor networks. Since the k-medoid problem is NP hard, all existing work deals with approximate solutions on relatively small datasets. This paper aims at efficient methods for very large spatial databases, motivated by: (i) the high and ever increasing availability of spatial data, and (ii) the need for novel query types and improved services. The proposed solutions exploit the intrinsic grouping properties of a data partition index in order …


Preventing Location-Based Identity Inference In Anonymous Spatial Queries, Panos Kalnis, Gabriel Ghinita, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias Dec 2010

Preventing Location-Based Identity Inference In Anonymous Spatial Queries, Panos Kalnis, Gabriel Ghinita, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

The increasing trend of embedding positioning capabilities (for example, GPS) in mobile devices facilitates the widespread use of location-based services. For such applications to succeed, privacy and confidentiality are essential. Existing privacy-enhancing techniques rely on encryption to safeguard communication channels, and on pseudonyms to protect user identities. Nevertheless, the query contents may disclose the physical location of the user. In this paper, we present a framework for preventing location-based identity inference of users who issue spatial queries to location-based services. We propose transformations based on the well-established K-anonymity concept to compute exact answers for range and nearest neighbor search, without …


Anonymous Query Processing In Road Networks, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Man Lung Yiu Dec 2010

Anonymous Query Processing In Road Networks, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Man Lung Yiu

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

The increasing availability of location-aware mobile devices has given rise to a flurry of location-based services (LBSs). Due to the nature of spatial queries, an LBS needs the user position in order to process her requests. On the other hand, revealing exact user locations to a (potentially untrusted) LBS may pinpoint their identities and breach their privacy. To address this issue, spatial anonymity techniques obfuscate user locations, forwarding to the LBS a sufficiently large region instead. Existing methods explicitly target processing in the euclidean space and do not apply when proximity to the users is defined according to network distance …


Query Processing In Spatial Databases Containing Obstacles, Jun Zhang, Dimitris Papadias, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Manli Zhu Dec 2010

Query Processing In Spatial Databases Containing Obstacles, Jun Zhang, Dimitris Papadias, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Manli Zhu

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

Despite the existence of obstacles in many database applications, traditional spatial query processing assumes that points in space are directly reachable and utilizes the Euclidean distance metric. In this paper, we study spatial queries in the presence of obstacles, where the obstructed distance between two points is defined as the length of the shortest path that connects them without crossing any obstacles. We propose efficient algorithms for the most important query types, namely, range search, nearest neighbours, e-distance joins, closest pairs and distance semi-joins, assuming that both data objects and obstacles are indexed by R-trees. The effectiveness of the proposed …


Continuous Monitoring Of Spatial Queries In Wireless Broadcast Environments, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Spiridon Bakiras, Dimitris Papadias Dec 2010

Continuous Monitoring Of Spatial Queries In Wireless Broadcast Environments, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Spiridon Bakiras, Dimitris Papadias

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

Wireless data broadcast is a promising technique for information dissemination that leverages the computational capabilities of the mobile devices in order to enhance the scalability of the system. Under this environment, the data are continuously broadcast by the server, interleaved with some indexing information for query processing. Clients may then tune in the broadcast channel and process their queries locally without contacting the server. Previous work on spatial query processing for wireless broadcast systems has only considered snapshot queries over static data. In this paper, we propose an air indexing framework that 1) outperforms the existing (i.e., snapshot) techniques in …


Capacity Constrained Assignment In Spatial Databases, Hou U Leong, Man Lung Yiu, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Nikos Mamoulis Dec 2010

Capacity Constrained Assignment In Spatial Databases, Hou U Leong, Man Lung Yiu, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Nikos Mamoulis

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

Given a point set P of customers (e.g., WiFi receivers) and a point set Q of service providers (e.g., wireless access points), where each q 2 Q has a capacity q.k, the capacity constrained assignment (CCA) is a matching M Q × P such that (i) each point q 2 Q (p 2 P) appears at most k times (at most nce) in M, (ii) the size of M is maximized (i.e., it comprises min{|P|,P q2Q q.k} pairs), and (iii) the total assignment cost (i.e., the sum of Euclidean distances within all pairs) is minimized. Thus, the CCA problem is …


A Threshold-Based Algorithm For Continuous Monitoring Of K Nearest Neighbors, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias, Spiridon Bakiras, Yufei Tao Dec 2010

A Threshold-Based Algorithm For Continuous Monitoring Of K Nearest Neighbors, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias, Spiridon Bakiras, Yufei Tao

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

Assume a set of moving objects and a central server that monitors their positions over time, while processing continuous nearest neighbor queries from geographically distributed clients. In order to always report up-to-date results, the server could constantly obtain the most recent position of all objects. However, this naïve solution requires the transmission of a large number of rapid data streams corresponding to location updates. Intuitively, current information is necessary only for objects that may influence some query result (i.e., they may be included in the nearest neighbor set of some client). Motivated by this observation, we present a threshold-based algorithm …


Anonymous Query Processing In Road Networks, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Man Lung Yiu Jan 2010

Anonymous Query Processing In Road Networks, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Man Lung Yiu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The increasing availability of location-aware mobile devices has given rise to a flurry of location-based services (LBSs). Due to the nature of spatial queries, an LBS needs the user position in order to process her requests. On the other hand, revealing exact user locations to a (potentially untrusted) LBS may pinpoint their identities and breach their privacy. To address this issue, spatial anonymity techniques obfuscate user locations, forwarding to the LBS a sufficiently large region instead. Existing methods explicitly target processing in the euclidean space and do not apply when proximity to the users is defined according to network distance …


Continuous Monitoring Of Spatial Queries In Wireless Broadcast Environments, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Spiridon Bakiras, Dimitris Papadias Oct 2009

Continuous Monitoring Of Spatial Queries In Wireless Broadcast Environments, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Spiridon Bakiras, Dimitris Papadias

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless data broadcast is a promising technique for information dissemination that leverages the computational capabilities of the mobile devices in order to enhance the scalability of the system. Under this environment, the data are continuously broadcast by the server, interleaved with some indexing information for query processing. Clients may then tune in the broadcast channel and process their queries locally without contacting the server. Previous work on spatial query processing for wireless broadcast systems has only considered snapshot queries over static data. In this paper, we propose an air indexing framework that 1) outperforms the existing (i.e., snapshot) techniques in …


On Efficient Mutual Nearest Neighbor Query Processing In Spatial Databases, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng, Gencai Chen, Qing Li Aug 2009

On Efficient Mutual Nearest Neighbor Query Processing In Spatial Databases, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng, Gencai Chen, Qing Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper studies a new form of nearest neighbor queries in spatial databases, namely, mutual nearest neighbour (MNN) search. Given a set D of objects and a query object q, an MNN query returns from D, the set of objects that are among the k1 (≥ 1) nearest neighbors (NNs) of q; meanwhile, have q as one of their k2(≥ 1) NNs. Although MNN queries are useful in many applications involving decision making, data mining, and pattern recognition, it cannot be efficiently handled by existing spatial query processing approaches. In this paper, we present …


Tree-Based Partition Querying: A Methodology For Computing Medoids In Large Spatial Datasets, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias, Spiros Papadimitriou Jul 2008

Tree-Based Partition Querying: A Methodology For Computing Medoids In Large Spatial Datasets, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias, Spiros Papadimitriou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Besides traditional domains (e.g., resource allocation, data mining applications), algorithms for medoid computation and related problems will play an important role in numerous emerging fields, such as location based services and sensor networks. Since the k-medoid problem is NP hard, all existing work deals with approximate solutions on relatively small datasets. This paper aims at efficient methods for very large spatial databases, motivated by: (i) the high and ever increasing availability of spatial data, and (ii) the need for novel query types and improved services. The proposed solutions exploit the intrinsic grouping properties of a data partition index in order …


Capacity Constrained Assignment In Spatial Databases, Hou U Leong, Man Lung Yiu, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Nikos Mamoulis Jun 2008

Capacity Constrained Assignment In Spatial Databases, Hou U Leong, Man Lung Yiu, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Nikos Mamoulis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given a point set P of customers (e.g., WiFi receivers) and a point set Q of service providers (e.g., wireless access points), where each q 2 Q has a capacity q.k, the capacity constrained assignment (CCA) is a matching M Q × P such that (i) each point q 2 Q (p 2 P) appears at most k times (at most nce) in M, (ii) the size of M is maximized (i.e., it comprises min{|P|,P q2Q q.k} pairs), and (iii) the total assignment cost (i.e., the sum of Euclidean distances within all pairs) is minimized. Thus, the CCA problem is …


Preventing Location-Based Identity Inference In Anonymous Spatial Queries, Panos Kalnis, Gabriel Ghinita, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias Dec 2007

Preventing Location-Based Identity Inference In Anonymous Spatial Queries, Panos Kalnis, Gabriel Ghinita, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The increasing trend of embedding positioning capabilities (for example, GPS) in mobile devices facilitates the widespread use of location-based services. For such applications to succeed, privacy and confidentiality are essential. Existing privacy-enhancing techniques rely on encryption to safeguard communication channels, and on pseudonyms to protect user identities. Nevertheless, the query contents may disclose the physical location of the user. In this paper, we present a framework for preventing location-based identity inference of users who issue spatial queries to location-based services. We propose transformations based on the well-established K-anonymity concept to compute exact answers for range and nearest neighbor search, without …


A Threshold-Based Algorithm For Continuous Monitoring Of K Nearest Neighbors, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias, Spiridon Bakiras, Yufei Tao Nov 2005

A Threshold-Based Algorithm For Continuous Monitoring Of K Nearest Neighbors, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias, Spiridon Bakiras, Yufei Tao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Assume a set of moving objects and a central server that monitors their positions over time, while processing continuous nearest neighbor queries from geographically distributed clients. In order to always report up-to-date results, the server could constantly obtain the most recent position of all objects. However, this naïve solution requires the transmission of a large number of rapid data streams corresponding to location updates. Intuitively, current information is necessary only for objects that may influence some query result (i.e., they may be included in the nearest neighbor set of some client). Motivated by this observation, we present a threshold-based algorithm …


Query Processing In Spatial Databases Containing Obstacles, Jun Zhang, Dimitris Papadias, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Manli Zhu Nov 2005

Query Processing In Spatial Databases Containing Obstacles, Jun Zhang, Dimitris Papadias, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Manli Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the existence of obstacles in many database applications, traditional spatial query processing assumes that points in space are directly reachable and utilizes the Euclidean distance metric. In this paper, we study spatial queries in the presence of obstacles, where the obstructed distance between two points is defined as the length of the shortest path that connects them without crossing any obstacles. We propose efficient algorithms for the most important query types, namely, range search, nearest neighbours, e-distance joins, closest pairs and distance semi-joins, assuming that both data objects and obstacles are indexed by R-trees. The effectiveness of the proposed …