Online Query Processing in Geographic Information Systems

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been widely used in many applications for exploring large georeferenced data. With the recent advances in Internet technologies, a large volume of GIS data is available on the Web. As a result, an increasing number of emerging applications began to provide tools for accessing these data. However, exploring these large data sets through spatial queries can be very time and resource intensive. The need for interactive spatial queries has arisen in many GIS applications for efficient decision-support. Another issue related to online query processing in GIS is the limited access to Web data by certain types of queries due to restrictive Web interfaces. This problem hinders online data retrieval, which necessitates for methods that utilize certain query types to provide solutions to non-supported queries. This book studies technical, practical and theoretical issues in designing and implementing online query processing in GIS and provides techniques for interactive spatial joins and efficient Web data retrieval. This work should be useful to professionals in spatial databases and GIS.