Direction-based spatial skyline for retrieving surrounding objects

Abstract

Retrieval of surrounding data objects has many potential applications in spatial databases including nearby point-of-interest retrieval surrounding a user and digital gaming. This paper presents a novel query, called direction-based spatial skyline (DSS), for retrieving surrounding objects in spatial databases. A DSS query retrieves all surrounding objects from a spatial database that are not directionally dominated by other data objects w.r.t. a given query object. The proposed DSS query is rotationally invariant, fair and stable. The paper also presents efficient algorithms for processing DSS queries in spatial databases by designing novel data pruning techniques using R-Tree data indexing scheme. We conduct extensive experiments using both real and synthetic datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms.