Abstract: A spatial database manages multidimensional objects provides fast access to those objects based on different selection criteria. The importance of spatial databases is reflected by the convenience of modeling entities of reality in a geometric manner. For example, locations of restaurants, hotels, hospitals and so on are often represented as points in a map, while larger extents such as parks, lakes, and landscapes often as a combination of rectangles. Many functionalities of a spatial database are useful in various ways in specific contexts. For instance, in a geography information system, range search can be deployed to find all restaurants in a certain area, while nearest neighbor retrieval can discover the restaurant closest to a given address. Conventional spatial queries, such as range search and nearest neighbor retrieval, involve only conditions on objects’ geometric properties. Today, many modern applications call for novel forms of queries that aim to find objects satisfying both a spatial predicate, and a predicate on their associated texts. For example, instead of considering all the restaurants, a nearest neighbor query would instead ask for the restaurant that is the closest among those whose menus contain “steak, spaghetti, brandy” all at the same time. Currently, the best solution to such queries is based on the IR2-tree, which, as shown in this paper, has a few deficiencies that seriously impact its efficiency. Motivated by this, this work develop a new access method called the spatial inverted index that extends the conventional inverted index to cope with multidimensional data and comes with algorithms that can answer nearest neighbor queries with keywords in real time.

Keywords: Spatial database, geometric, spatial queries, IR2-tree, multidimensional data.