Adaptive indexing allows for the progressive and simultaneous query-driven exploration and indexing of memoryresident data, starting as soon as they become available without upfront indexing. This technique has been so far applied to onedimensional and multidimensional data, as well as to objects with spatial extent arising in geographic information systems. However, existing spatial adaptive indexing methods cater to static data made available in an one-off manner. To date, no spatial adaptive indexing method can ingest data updates interleaved with data exploration. In this paper we introduce GLIDE, a novel method that intertwines the adaptive indexing and incremental updating of a spatial-object data set. GLIDE builds a hierarchical spatial index incrementally in response to queries and also ingests updates judiciously into it. We examine several design choices and settle for a variant that combines gradual self-driven top-down insertions with query-driven indexing operations. In an extensive experimental comparison, we show that GLIDE achieves a lower cumulative cost than upfront-indexing methods and adaptiveindexing baselines.

By adaptive indexing , an index grows dynamically and progressively through query processing. This mode of index-building, well explored over the past fifteen years, proves especially useful in exploratory scenarios where prebuilt indexes do not pay off the time to construct them, as the query workload variably focuses on particular areas of the search space, or the data become quickly obsolete. Despite a significant body of work in multidimensional adaptive indexing, there remains a gap in comparative studies that evaluate these methods on equal terms in a wide spectrum of settings, including data types, distributions, sizes, and workload patterns. This work fills this gap with a comprehensive benchmark to thoroughly evaluate the performance, strengths, and limitations of existing multidimensional adaptive indexing methods across diverse scenarios, contributing valuable insights that complement previous works. Further, we suggest supplementary technical extensions that enhance the efficiency of existing methods.

Non-point spatial objects (e.g., polygons, linestrings, etc.) are ubiquitous. We study the problem of indexing non-point objects in memory for range queries and spatial intersection joins. We propose a secondary partitioning technique for space-oriented partitioning indices (e.g., grids), which improves their performance significantly, by avoiding the generation and elimination of duplicate results. Our approach is easy to implement and can be used by any space-partitioning index to significantly reduce the cost of range queries and intersection joins. In addition, the secondary partitions can be processed independently, which makes our method appropriate for distributed and parallel indexing. Experiments on real datasets confirm the advantage of our approach against alternative duplicate elimination techniques and data-oriented state-of-the-art spatial indices. We also show that our partitioning technique, paired with optimized partition-to-partition join algorithms, typically reduces the cost of spatial joins by around 50%.

With the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), Smart(er) Cities have been a research goal of researchers, businesses and local authorities willing to adopt IoT technologies to improve their services. Among them, Smart Transportation [7,8], the integrated application of modern technologies and management strategies in transportation systems, refers to the adoption of new IoT solutions to improve urban mobility. These technologies aim to provide innovative solutions related to different modes of transport and traffic management and enable users to be better informed and make safer and 'smarter' use of transport networks. This talk presents SmartCityBus, a data-driven intelligent transportation system (ITS) whose main objective is to use online and offline data in order to provide accurate statistics and predictions and improve public transportation services in the short and medium/long term.

Similarity search in high-dimensional metric spaces is routinely used in many applications including content-based image retrieval, bioinformatics, data mining, and recommender systems. Search can be accelerated by the use of an index. However, constructing a high-dimensional index can be quite expensive and may not pay off if the number of queries against the data is not large. In these circumstances, it is beneficial to construct an index adaptively , while responding to a query workload. Existing work on multidimensional adaptive indexing partitions space into orthotopes (i.e., hyperrectangular units). This approach, however, is highly ineffective in high-dimensional spaces. In this paper, we propose AV-tree: an alternative method for adaptive high-dimensional indexing that exploits previously computed distances, using query centers as vantage points. Our experimental study shows that AV-tree yields cumulative cost for the first several hundred or even thousand queries much lower than that of pre-built indices. After thousands of queries, the per-query performance of the AV-tree converges or even surpasses that of the state-of-the-art MVP-tree. Arguably, our approach is commendable in environments where the expected number of queries is not large while there is a need to start answering queries as soon as possible, such as applications where data are updated frequently and past data soon become obsolete.

Non-point spatial objects (e.g., polygons, linestrings, etc.) are ubiquitous and their effective management is always timely. We study the problem of indexing non-point objects in memory. We propose a secondary partitioning technique for space-oriented partitioning indices (e.g., grids), which improves their performance significantly, by avoiding the generation and elimination of duplicate results. Our approach is novel and of a high impact, as (i) it is extremely easy to implement and (ii) it can be used by any space-partitioning index. We show how our approach can be used to boost the performance of spatial range queries. We also show how we can avoid performing the expensive refinement step of a range query for the majority of objects and study the efficient processing of numerous queries in batch and in parallel. Extensive experiments on real datasets confirm the superiority of space-oriented partitioning over data-oriented partitioning and the advantage of our approach against alternative duplicate elimination techniques.