Multi-Way Distance Join Queries in Spatial Databases

Let a tuple of n objects obeying a query graph (QG) be called the n-tuple. The “Ddistancevalue” of this n-tuple is the value of a linear function of distances of the n objects that make up this ntuple, according to the edges of the QG. This paper addresses the problem of finding the K n-tuples between n spatial datasets that have the smallest Ddistance-values, the so-called K-Multi-Way Distance Join Query (K-MWDJQ), where each set is indexed by an R-tree-based structure. This query can be viewed as an extension of K-Closest-Pairs Query (K-CPQ) [CMT01] for n inputs. In addition, a recursive non-incremental branch-and-bound algorithm following a Depth-First search for processing synchronously all inputs without producing any intermediate result is proposed. Enhanced pruning techniques are also applied to n R-trees nodes in order to reduce the total response time and the number of distance computations of the query. Due to the exponential nature of the problem, we also propose a time-based approximate version of the recursive algorithm that combines approximation techniques to adjust the quality of the result and the global processing time. Finally, we give a detailed experimental study of the proposed algorithms using real spatial datasets, highlighting their performance and the quality of the approximate results.