Reasoning on Incompleteness of Spatial Information for Effectively and Efficiently Answering Range Queries over Incomplete Spatial Databases

Modern spatial database applications more and more expose incomplete information, which makes answering range queries over incomplete spatial databases a leading research challenge in spatial database systems research. A significant instance of this scenario is represented by the application scenario in which the geometrical information on a sub-set of spatial database objects is incomplete whereas the spatial database still stores topological relations among these objects (e.g., containment relations). Focusing on the spatial database application scenario above, in this paper we propose and experimentally assess a novel technique for efficiently answering range queries over incomplete spatial databases via integrating geometrical information and topological reasoning. Our proposed technique results to be not only effective but also efficient against both synthetic and real-life spatial data sets.