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...
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Recommended Reading
Beckmann N, Kriegel H-P, Schneider R, Seeger B. The R*-tree: an efficient and robust access method for points and rectangles. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data; 1990. p. 322–31.
Finkel RA, Bentley JL. Quad Trees: a data structure for retrieval on composite keys. Acta Informatica. 1974;4(1):1–9.
Freeston MA. General solution of the n-dimensional B-tree problem. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data; 1995. p. 80–91.
Gaede V, Guenther O. Multidimensional access methods. ACM Comput Surv. 1998;30(2):170–231.
Guttman A. R-trees: a dynamic index structure for spatial searching. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data; 1984. p. 47–57.
Hadjieleftheriou M, Hoel E, Tsotras VJ. SaIL: a spatial index library for efficient application integration. GeoInformatica. 2005;9(4):367–89.
Henrich A, Six H-W, Widmayer P. The LSD tree: spatial access to multidimensional point and non point objects. In: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases; 1989. p. 43–53.
Kamel I, Faloutsos C. Hilbert R-tree: an improved R-tree using fractals. In: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases; 1994. p. 500–09.
Lomet DB, Salzberg B. The hB-tree: a multiattribute indexing method with good guaranteed performance. ACM Trans Database Syst. 1990;15(4): 625–58.
Nievergelt J, Hinterberger H, Sevcik KC. The grid file: an adaptable symmetric multikey file structure. ACM Trans Database Syst. 1984;9(1): 38–71.
Roussopoulos N, Leifker D. Direct spatial search on pictorial databases using packed R-trees. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data; 1985. p. 17–31.
Roussopoulos N, Kelley S, Vincent F. Nearest neighbor queries. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data; 1995. p. 71–9.
Samet H. The design and analysis of spatial data structures. Addison-Wesley; Reading, MA, 1990.
Seeger B, Kriegel H-P. The Buddy-tree: an efficient and robust access method for spatial database systems. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases; 1990. p. 590–601.
Sellis T, Roussopoulos N, Faloutsos C. The R+-tree: a dynamic index for multidimensional objects. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases; 1987. p. 507–18.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this entry
Cite this entry
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_355
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-8266-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-8265-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering