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R-Tree (and Family)

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Definition

The R-tree is an indexing scheme that has been originally proposed towards organizing spatial objects such as points, rectangles and polygons. It is a hierarchical data structure suitable to index objects in secondary storage (disk) as well as in main memory. The R-tree has been extensively used by researchers to offer efficient processing of queries in multi-dimensional data sets. Queries such as range, nearest-neighbor and spatial joins are supported efficiently leading to considerable decrease in computational and I/O time in comparison to previous approaches. The R-tree is capable of handling diverse types of objects, by using approximations. This means that an object is approximated by its minimum bounding rectangle (MBR) towards providing an efficient filtering step. Objects that survive the filtering step are inspected further for relevance in the refinement step. The advantages of the structure, its simplicity as well as its resemblance to the B+-tree “persuaded”...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Apostolos N. Papadopoulos & Alexandros Nanopoulos

  2. University of Almeria, Almeria, Spain

    Antonio Corral

  3. University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece

    Yannis Theodoridis

Authors
  1. Apostolos N. Papadopoulos
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  2. Antonio Corral
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  3. Alexandros Nanopoulos
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  4. Yannis Theodoridis
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Papadopoulos, A., Corral, A., Nanopoulos, A., Theodoridis, Y. (2009). R-Tree (and Family). In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_300

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