A Unified Algorithm for Continuous Monitoring of Spatial Queries

Continuous monitoring of spatial queries has gained significant research attention in the past few years. Although numerous algorithms have been proposed to solve specific queries, there does not exist a unified algorithm that solves a broad class of spatial queries. In this paper, we first define a versatile top-k query and show that various important spatial queries can be modeled to a versatile top-k query by defining a suitable scoring function. Then, we propose an efficient algorithm to continuously monitor the versatile top-k queries. To show the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we model various inherently different spatial queries to the versatile top-k query and conduct experiments to show the efficiency of our unified algorithm. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our unified algorithm is several times faster than the existing best known algorithms for monitoring constrained k nearest neighbors queries, furthest k neighbors queries and aggregate k nearest neighbors queries.