Modeling and Querying Spatial Networks in Databases

Infrastructures like transportation, power, and pipeline networks which are characterized by a spatial embedding are known as spatial networks. Spatial networks are ubiquitous in our everyday life and used in transport, navigation, and city planning as well as in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and other geo-spatial applications. The largely increasing amount of generated data about spatial networks can only be efficiently stored and analyzed in a database system. However database support for large spatial networks in order to represent, store, query, and manipulate them is rare. This article aims to provide a conceptual, abstract, and formal model of spatial networks, called Spatial Network Algebra (SNA). It includes data types, operations, and predicates and serves as a specification for their later implementation in spatial database systems and GIS. Finally, we show how our spatial network concepts can be embedded into an SQL-like query language.