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Skyline Queries

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Encyclopedia of GIS

Synonyms

Top-N queries; Search, multi-criteria; Search, multi‐dimensional; Ranking Results; Ranking, multi‐dimensional; Information Retrieval; Nested-loop, blocked; Divide and conquer; Nearest Neighbor algorithm; Branch and Bound

Definition

Given a set of points p 1, p 2, …, p n , the skyline query returns a set of points P, called skyline points, such that any point p i  ∈ P is not dominated by any other point in the dataset. A point p 1 dominates another point p 2 if p 1 is not worse than p 2 in all dimensions, and p 1 is better than p 2 in at least one dimension. In other words, a point p 1 dominates another point p 2 if and only if the coordinate of p 1 on any axis is smaller than the corresponding coordinate of p 2.

For example, Fig. 1 shows a dataset containing information about hotels. The distance of the hotel from the beach and the price for each hotel are assigned to the X, Yaxis of the plot respectively. There are 12 hotels in total represented as data-points in the...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Nilu Thakur

Authors
  1. Nilu Thakur
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Shashi Shekhar (McKnight Distinguished University Professor) (McKnight Distinguished University Professor)

  2. Management Science and Information Systems Department, Rutgers Business School Newark and New Brunswick Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Newark, NJ, 07102, USA

    Hui Xiong (Assistant Professor) (Assistant Professor)

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag

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Thakur, N. (2008). Skyline Queries. In: Shekhar, S., Xiong, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of GIS. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35973-1_1221

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