research-article

Public Access

Spatial computing

Authors:
Shashi Shekhar

University of Minnesota

University of Minnesota
View Profile

,
Steven K. Feiner

Columbia University, New York

Columbia University, New York
View Profile

,
Walid G. Aref

Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN

Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
View Profile

Authors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM Volume 59 Issue 1January 2016pp 72–81https://doi.org/10.1145/2756547

Published:21 December 2015Publication History

Communications of the ACM

Abstract

Knowing where you are in space and time promises a deeper understanding of neighbors, ecosystems, and the environment.

Supplemental Material

Available for Download

pdf

p72-shekhar-supp.pdf (894.4 KB)

Supplemental material.

References

Ali, R.Y., Gunturi, V.M., Shekhar, S., Eldawy, A., Mokbel, M.F., Kotz, A.J., and Northrop, W.F. Future connected vehicles: Challenges and opportunities for spatiotemporal computing. In Proceedings of the 23^rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (Seattle, WA, Nov. 3--6). ACM Press, New York, 2015.Google ScholarDigital Library
Auchincloss, A.H., Gebreab, S.Y., Mair, C., and Roux, A.V.D. A review of spatial methods in epidemiology, 2000--2010. Annual Review of Public Health 33 (2012), 107.Google ScholarCross Ref
Campbell, J.B. and Wynne, R.H. Introduction to Remote Sensing, Fifth Edition. The Guilford Press, New York, 2011.Google Scholar
Caron, C., Roche, S., Goyer, D., and Jaton, A. GIScience journals ranking and evaluation: An international Delphi study. Transactions in GIS 12, 3 (2008), 293--321.Google ScholarCross Ref
De Berg, M., Van Kreveld, M., Overmars, M., and Schwarzkopf, O. Computational Geometry. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg, Germany, 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
Devillers, R., Jeansoulin, R., and Goodchild, M.F. Fundamentals of Spatial Data Quality (Geographical Information Systems Series). Wiley-ISTE, New York, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
Dobson, J. and Fisher, P. Geoslavery. Technology and Society Magazine 22, 1 (Spring 2003), 47--52.Google ScholarCross Ref
Downs, R.M., Stea, D., and Boulding, K.E. Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behavior. Aldine Transaction, a division of Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ, and London, U.K., 2005.Google Scholar
Esri. Understanding Geodesic Buffering; http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0111/geodesic.htmlGoogle Scholar
Ester, M., Kriegel, H.-P. and Sander, J. Spatial data mining: A database approach. In Advances in Spatial Databases, Volume 1262 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, Germany, 1997, 47--66. Google ScholarDigital Library
Faulkner, M., Olson, M., Chandy, R., Krause, J., Chandy, K., and Krause, A. The next big one: Detecting earthquakes and other rare events from community-based sensors. In Proceedings of the 10^th International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (Chicago, IL, Apr. 12--14). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, D.C., 2011, 13--24.Google Scholar
Gelfand, A.E., Diggle, P., Guttorp, P., and Fuentes, M. Handbook of Spatial Statistics. Chapman and Hall/CRC Handbooks of Modern Statistical Methods. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 2010.Google Scholar
Goodchild, M.F. Citizens as sensors: The world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal 69, 4 (Aug. 2007), 211--221.Google ScholarCross Ref
Gore, A. The digital Earth: Understanding our planet in the 21^st century. Australian Surveyor 43, 2 (1998), 89--91.Google ScholarCross Ref
Jordan, L.J. Flood map delays spur angst for Gulf Coast, but it may be for nothing. Djournal.com (Mar. 26, 2006); http://goo.gl/IIzvzvGoogle Scholar
Kemp, K.K. Encyclopedia of Geographic Information Science. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2007.Google Scholar
Krause, A., Horvitz, E., Kansal, A., and Zhao, F. Toward community sensing. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (St. Louis, MO, Apr. 22--24). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, D.C., 2008, 481--492. Google ScholarDigital Library
Krumm, J. A survey of computational location privacy. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 13, 6 (Aug. 2009), 391--399. Google ScholarDigital Library
Kumar, V., Shekhar, S. and Fagmous, J., Eds. Computing & climate. Computing in Science and Engineering 17, 6 (Nov./Dec. 2015).Google Scholar
Lovell, J. Left-hand-turn elimination. The New York Times (Dec. 9, 2007).Google Scholar
Manyika, J., Institute, M.G., Chui, M., Brown, B., Bughin, J., Dobbs, R., Roxburgh, C., and Byers, A.H. Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity. McKinsey Global Institute, 2011; http://goo.gl/BWJPqPGoogle Scholar
McMaster, R.B. and Usery, E.L. A Research Agenda for Geographic Information Science. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 2004.Google ScholarCross Ref
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. IT Roadmap to a Geospatial Future. Report of the Committee on Intersections Between Geospatial Information and Information Technology. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2003.Google Scholar
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Global Navigation Satellite Systems: Report of a Joint Workshop of the National Academy of Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2012.Google Scholar
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Priorities for GEOINT Research at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2006.Google Scholar
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Successful Response Starts with a Map: Improving Geospatial Support for Disaster Management. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2007.Google Scholar
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Figure 3.1: The precision of current geodetic applications as a function of the required time interval. In Precise Geodetic Infrastructure: National Requirements for a Shared Resource. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2010.Google Scholar
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. New Research Directions for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2010.Google Scholar
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Understanding the Changing Planet: Strategic Directions for the Geographical Sciences. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2010.Google Scholar
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Frontiers in Massive Data Analysis. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2013.Google Scholar
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Continuity of NASA Earth Observation from Space: A Value Framework (prepublication draft). The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2015; http://www.nap.edu/read/21789/chapter/1Google Scholar
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Land change modeling approaches. In Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2014.Google Scholar
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: Committee on Human and Environmental Exposure Science in the 21^st Century. Exposure Science in the 21^st Century: A Vision and a Strategy. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2012.Google Scholar
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: Panel on Confidentiality Issues Arising from the Integration of Remotely Sensed and Self-Identifying Data. Putting People on the Map: Protecting Confidentiality with Linked Social-Spatial Data. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2007.Google Scholar
National Science Foundation. Report of the NSF Workshop on Intelligent Systems Research to Support Geosciences and the EarthCube Mission. Arlington, VA, Mar. 2015; http://goo.gl/MyBsQY (workshop report summary http://is-geo.org/report/)Google Scholar
National Science Foundation. An NSF Workshop to Identify Interdisciplinary Data Science Approaches and Challenges to Enhance Understanding of Interactions of Food Systems with Energy and Water Systems. The National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Washington, D.C., Oct. 2015; http://goo.gl/GCQ2fjGoogle Scholar
Okolloh, O. Ushahidi, or 'testimony': Web 2.0 tools for crowdsourcing crisis information. Participatory Learning and Action 59, 1 (May 2009), 65--70.Google Scholar
Open GIS Consortium. Open GIS Simple Features for SQL; http://www.opengis.orgGoogle Scholar
Parkinson, B.W. and Spilker, J.J. Global Positioning System: Theory and Applications, Volume One. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Reston, VA, 1996.Google Scholar
Pfoser, D., Tao, Y., Mouratidis, K., Nascimento, M.A., Mobel, M., Shekhar, S., and Huang, Y., Eds. Challenge and Vision Track. In the 12^th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases, Volume 6849 of Lecture Notes on Computer Science (Minneapolis, MN, Aug. 24--26). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, Germany, 2011; http://sstd2011.cs.umn.edu/Google Scholar
Pomfret, K. Latitudes and Attitudes: Zooming In on Geospatial Data, Privacy, and the Law in the Digital Age. Centre for Spatial Law and Policy, Richmond, VA, Mar. 27, 2013; http://www.spatiallaw.com/Uploads/Latitudes_and_Attitudes.pdfGoogle Scholar
Pomfret, K.D. Geotargeted Alerts: Potential Impact of Privacy Concerns. The National Academy of Sciences, Washington D.C., Feb. 21, 2013.Google Scholar
Regalado, A. New Google Earth Engine. ScienceInsider (Dec. 3, 2010); http://news.sciencemag.org/technology/2010/12/new-google-earth-engineGoogle Scholar
Richmond, R. Digital help for Haiti. The New York Times (Jan. 27 2010).Google Scholar
Ripley, B.D. Spatial Statistics, Volume 575. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ, 2005.Google Scholar
Samet, H. The Design and Analysis of Spatial Data Structures. Addison-Wesley Series in Computer Science, Reading, MA, 1989. Google ScholarDigital Library
Samet, H. Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures. The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics, San Francisco, CA, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
Schiller, J. and Voisard, A. Location-Based Services. Elsevier, San Francisco, CA, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
Sellis, T. et al., Eds. Spatio-Temporal Databases: The CHOROCHRONOS Approach. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 2003.Google Scholar
Shekhar, S. and Chawla, S. Spatial Databases: A Tour. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2003.Google Scholar
Shekhar, S., Evans, M.R., Kang, J.M., and Mohan, P. Identifying patterns in spatial information: A survey of methods. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 1, 3 (May/June 2011), 193--214.Google ScholarCross Ref
Shekhar, S., Feiner, S., and Aref, W. From GPS and virtual globes to spatial computing---2020. GeoInformatica 19, 4 (Oct. 2015), 799--832. Google ScholarDigital Library
Shekhar, S. and Xiong, H. Encyclopedia of GIS. Springer, New York, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
Snow, J. On the Mode of Communication of Cholera. John Churchill, London, England, 1855.Google Scholar
Sobel, D. Longitude. Walker Books, London, U.K., 2010.Google Scholar
U.S. EPA Office of Air and Radiation. The Inside Story: A Guide to Indoor Air Quality. Technical Report EPA 402-K-93-007. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C.; http://goo.gl/RkZUBUGoogle Scholar
Uttal, D.H. and Cohen, C.A. Spatial thinking and STEM education: When, why, and how. Psychology of Learning and Motivation 57, 2 (2012), 147--181.Google Scholar

Index Terms

Spatial computing
1. Hardware
  1. Communication hardware, interfaces and storage
2. Information systems
  1. Data management systems
    1. Database design and models
  2. Information systems applications
    1. Spatial-temporal systems

Recommendations

Spatial sorting

Many graphics and also non-graphics applications need efficient techniques to find the nearest neighbors of a given query point. There are two approaches to address this problem: space-partitioning and data-partitioning. We present a data-partitioning ...
Read More
Distance browsing in spatial databases

We compare two different techniques for browsing through a collection of spatial objects stored in an R-tree spatial data structure on the basis of their distances from an arbitrary spatial query object. The conventional approach is one that makes use ...
Read More
Continuous obstructed nearest neighbor queries in spatial databases
SIGMOD '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data

In this paper, we study a novel form of continuous nearest neighbor queries in the presence of obstacles, namely continuous obstructed nearest neighbor (CONN) search. It considers the impact of obstacles on the distance between objects, which is ignored ...
Read More

Comments

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

Published in
Communications of the ACM Volume 59, Issue 1
January 2016
120 pages
ISSN:0001-0782
EISSN:1557-7317
DOI:10.1145/2859829
Editor:
Moshe Y. Vardi
Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY
Issue’s Table of Contents
Copyright © 2015 ACM
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]
Sponsors
In-Cooperation
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
- Published: 21 December 2015
Permissions
Request permissions about this article.
Request Permissions

Check for updates
Qualifiers
- research-article
- Popular
- Refereed
Conference
Funding Sources
Other Metrics
View Article Metrics

Article Metrics
- 66
  Total Citations
  View Citations
- 16,135
  Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)1,087
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)250
Other Metrics
View Author Metrics
Cited By
View all

PDF Format

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF Chinese translation

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format .

View HTML Format

Spatial computing

Communications of the ACM

Abstract

Supplemental Material

Available for Download

References

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Spatial sorting

Distance browsing in spatial databases

Continuous obstructed nearest neighbor queries in spatial databases