On the Effect of Location Uncertainty in Spatial Querying

• Published in: IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering Vol. 21; no. 3; pp. 366 - 383
• Main Authors: Frentzos, E., Gratsias, K., Theodoridis, Y.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.03.2009; IEEE Computer Society; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Computer science; control theory; systems; Data points; Data processing. List processing. Character string processing; Database systems; Estimation theory; Exact sciences and technology; Geographic Information Systems; Global Positioning System; Information systems. Data bases; Mathematical analysis; Measurement errors; Memory organisation. Data processing; Position (location); Privacy; Proposals; Query processing; Software; Spatial databases; Spatial databases and GIS; Statistical distributions; Studies; Two dimensional; Uncertainty; Spatial databases and GIS; Spatial databases; Spatial data structures; Database query; Search algorithm; Range query; GIS; Computational geometry; Uncertainty handling; Storage management; Geographic information system; Data field; Spatial database; Object location
• ISSN: 1041-4347; 1558-2191
• DOI: 10.1109/TKDE.2008.164

An emerging topic in the field of spatial data management is the handling of location uncertainty of spatial objects, mainly due to inaccurate measurements. The literature on location uncertainty so far has focused on modifying traditional spatial search algorithms in order to handle the impact of objects' location uncertainty in query results. In this paper, we present the first, to the best of our knowledge, theoretical analysis that estimates the average number of false hits introduced in the results of rectangular range queries in the case of data points uniformly distributed in 2D space. Then, we relax the original distribution assumptions showing how to deal with arbitrarily distributed data points and more realistic location uncertainty distributions. The accuracy of the results of our analytical approach is demonstrated through an extensive experimental study using various synthetic and real datasets. Our proposal can be directly employed in spatial database systems in order to provide users with the accuracy of spatial query results based only on known dataset and query parameters.