Geographical Information Systems

CHAPTER 2

Similarity Join for Big

Geographic Data

Yasin N. Silva,*

Jason M. Reed,

Lisa M. Tsosie and

Timothy A. Matti

Introduction

Similarity Join is one of the most useful data processing and analysis

operations for geographic data. It retrieves all data pairs whose distances are

smaller than a predefi ned threshold ε. Multiple application scenarios need

to perform this operation over large amounts of data. Internet companies,

for instance, collect massive amounts of information on their customers such

as their geographic location and interests. They can use similarity queries

to provide enhanced services to their customers; for example, a movie ...