Indexing

The rapid growth of location-based services (LBS) has accumulated a massive amount of spatial data such as user GPS coordinates, which calls for efficient indexing structures to provide fast access to such data. Typical applications of spatial data include digital mapping services and location-based social networks, where spatial queries are issued by users such as finding restaurants within 3 kilometers around Alice or finding other users within 300 meters around Alice. Spatial indices have been studied extensively to support such queries. In the big data era, there may be millions of spatial queries and places of interests to be processed at the same time. This poses new challenges in both scalability and efficiency of spatial indexing techniques. Parallel spatial index structures are developed to address these challenges, which are summarized in the following section.