Information-Associated Join Indices for Spatial Range Search

Abstract Spatial join indices are join indices constructed for spatial objects. Similar to join indices in relational database systems, spatial join indices improve efficiency of spatial join operations. In this paper, a spatial-information-associated join indexing mechanism is developed to speed up spatial queries, especially, spatial range queries. Three distance-associated join index structures: basic, ring-structured and hierarchical, are developed and studied. Such join indexing structures can be further extended to include orientation information for flexible applications, which leads to zone-structured and other spatial-information-associated join indices. Our performance study and analysis show that spatial-information-associated join indices substantially improve the performance of spatial queries and that different structures are best suited for different applications.