Spatial Index Schemes for Cloud Environments - Geographical Information Systems: Trends and Technologies - page 50

CHAPTER 3
Spatial Index Schemes for
Cloud Environments
Wen-Chih Peng, a, * Ling-Yin Wei, a Ya-Ting Hsu, a Yi-Chin Pan a
and Wang-Chien Lee b
Introduction
In recent years, mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet computers
have become popular part of our daily life. Simultaneously, with the
increasing prevalence of the Global Positioning System (GPS), a large
number of location-based applications, such as Foursquare and Flickr, have
been developed. People are able to share their real-time events with friends
anytime and anywhere as long as the Internet is available. For example,
people can check into a specifi c location and can note their activities, and
they can see their friends'shared real time information using the Foursquare
application. These location-based applications induce that the amount of
multi-attribute data, which at least consist of locations and time-stamps are
dramatically increasing. In order to retrieve and manage this data effectively,
different database management systems (DBMSs) have been developed. For
traditional relational database management systems (RDBMSs), there are
several index structures, such as k-dimensional (k-d) trees (Bentley 1975),
quad trees (Finkel and Bentley 1974), and R-trees (Guttman 1984). However,
RDBMSs are unable to deal with thousands of millions of queries effi ciently
a National Chiao-Tung University, 1001 University Road, Hsinchu, Taiwan 300.
Emails: [e-mail]; [e-mail]; [e-mail];
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b The Pennsylvania State University, 1001 University Road, Hsinchu, Taiwan 300.