Spatial database management deals with the storage, indexing, and querying of data with spatial features, such as location and geometric extent. Many applications require the efficient management of spatial data, including Geographic Information Systems, Computer Aided Design, and Location Based Services. The goal of this book is to provide the reader with an overview of spatial data management technology, with an emphasis on indexing and search techniques. It first introduces spatial data models and queries and discusses the main issues of extending a database system to support spatial data. It presents indexing approaches for spatial data, with a focus on the R-tree. Query evaluation and optimization techniques for the most popular spatial query types (selections, nearest neighbor search, and spatial joins) are portrayed for data in Euclidean spaces and spatial networks. The book concludes by demonstrating the ample application of spatial data management technology on a wide range of related application domains: management of spatio-temporal data and high-dimensional feature vectors, multi-criteria ranking, data mining and OLAP, privacy-preserving data publishing, and spatial keyword search. Table of Contents: Introduction / Spatial Data / Indexing / Spatial Query Evaluation / Spatial Networks / Applications of Spatial Data Management Technology

Autorentext

Nikos Mamoulis received a diploma in Computer Engineering and Informatics in 1995 from the University of Patras, Greece, and a PhD in Computer Science in 2000 from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is currently an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Hong Kong, which he joined in 2001. In the past, he has worked as a research and development engineer at the Computer Technology Institute, Patras, Greece and as a post-doctoral researcher at the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), the Netherlands. During 2008-2009 he was on leave to the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII), Germany. His research focuses on the management, mining, and privacy-preserving publishing of complex data, including spatial, spatio-temporal, object-relational, multimedia, text and semi-structured data. He has served on the program committees of over 80 international conferences and workshops on data management and data mining. He was the general chair of SSDBM 2008, the PC co-chair of SSTD 2009, and he participated in the organization committees of several other conferences and workshops. He is currently serving as an associate editor for IEEE TKDE and the VLBJ Journal. Besides, he is an editorial board member for Geoinformatica Journal and was a field editor of the Encyclopedia of Geographic Information Systems. He is a member of the ACM, IEEE, and the SSTD Endowment.