A Taxonomy for Distance-Based Spatial Join Queries

Join operation is one of the most used operations in database management systems, including spatial databases. Hence, spatial join queries are very important in spatial database processing. There are many different kinds of spatial join queries, due to the richness in spatial data types and spatial operations. Therefore, it is important to understand the full spectrum of spatial join queries. The aim of this paper is to give a classification to one family type of spatial join, called the Distance-based Spatial Join. In the taxonomy, the authors divide this spatial join into three categories: (i) AllRange, (ii) All-kNN, and (iii) All-RNN. Each of these categories has its own variants. In this taxonomy, the authors confine the discussions to join queries on fixed points.