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Spatial Indexing Techniques

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Synonyms

Spatial access methods

Definition

A spatial index is a data structure designed to enable fast access to spatial data. Spatial data come in various forms, the most common being points, lines, and regions in n-dimensional space (practically, n = 2 or 3 in geographical information system (GIS) applications). Typical “selection” queries include the spatial range query (“find all objects that lie within a given query region”) and the spatial point query (“find all objects that contain a given query point”). In addition, multidimensional data introduce spatial relationships (such as overlapping and disjointness) and operators (e.g., nearest neighbor), which need to be efficiently supported as well. Example queries are the spatial join query (“find all pairs of objects that intersect each other”) and the nearest neighbor query (“find the five objects nearest to a given query point”). It should be noted that traditional indexing approaches (B+-trees, hashing, etc.) are not...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Yannis Manolopoulos

  2. University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece

    Yannis Theodoridis

  3. University of California-Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA

    Vassilis J. Tsotras

Authors
  1. Yannis Manolopoulos
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  2. Yannis Theodoridis
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  3. Vassilis J. Tsotras
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yannis Manolopoulos .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Dept. of Computer Science and Eng., Hong Kong Univ. of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR

    Dimitris Papadias

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Manolopoulos, Y., Theodoridis, Y., Tsotras, V.J. (2018). Spatial Indexing Techniques. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_355

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