PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


"On Processing Spatial Queries in Mobile Client/Server
Environments"

By Miss Manli Zhu


Abstract:

With the emergence of wireless communication, portable computing and
location sensing technologies, location-based, data-intensive applications
have been developed in various areas. Location-based applications make use
of location information to support spatial queries (e.g., finding the
nearest hotel for a user or displaying all restaurants in the geographic
area around him). In this proposal, we propose to study the processing of
spatial queries in mobile environments, where users can issue spatial
queries to the server while they are moving. Since the users are moving,
the server must be able to not only produce results that are valid with
respect to their current locations but update the results as the users
move to new locations. Coupled with the large number of users anticipated
in a mobile environment, the server must handle a high workload and as
such requires efficient query processing methods. Based on the uniqueness
of mobile client/server environments, this proposal i) studies the
conditions under which the user could move without affecting the result of
a window query, thus significantly reducing the network cost between the
clients and the server, ii) introduces the top-k spatial join and proposes
an efficient query processing algorithm for it, and iii) discusses the
real-time parallel processing of window queries on the server side. In
addition to these three main focuses, we discuss two problems for future
research, namely, visibility spatial queries and top-k monitoring system.


Date:     		Thursday, 22 April 2004

Time:                   3:00p.m.-5:00p.m.

Venue:                  Room 2404
			lifts 17-18

Committee Members:      Prof. Dik-Lun Lee (Supervisor)
			Prof. Dimitris Papadias (Chairman)
			Prof. Qiong Luo
			Prof. Jianliang Xu (Baptist Univ.)


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