Indexing Land Surface for Efficient kNN Query

Summary: Proposes the Surface Index R-tree (SIR-tree) with Tight Surface Index (TSI) and Loose Surface Index (LSI) to support exact skNN on land surfaces. Supports a priori-k-free, incremental search with localized pruning, reporting exact shortest surface paths and outperforming baselines in efficiency and accuracy on real data. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 9924
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2008
Pagerank: 0.00010207737
Overall Rank: 1,619 | 88.90%
DOI: 10.14778/1454159.1454276

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Cyrus Shahabi (University of Southern California)
2. Lu-An Tang (University of Southern California)
3. Songhua Xing (University of Southern California)

BibTeX Citation

@article{shahabi_vldb08,
        title = {{Indexing Land Surface for Efficient kNN Query}},
        author = {Shahabi, Cyrus and Tang, Lu-An and Xing, Songhua},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '08},
        volume = {1},
        number = {2},
        pages = {1020--1031},
        doi = {10.14778/1454159.1454276},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/1454159.1454276},
        year = {2008}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,618	Continuous Monitoring of Nearest Neighbors on Land Surface	2009	VLDB	0.00010207737
8,532	New Lower and Upper Bounds for Shortest Distance Queries on Terrains	2016	VLDB	5.4119882e-05
8,537	Finding Shortest Paths on Terrains by Killing Two Birds with One Stone	2014	VLDB	5.4119882e-05
8,543	Finding Shortest Path on Land Surface	2011	SIGMOD	5.4119882e-05
10,213	Constrained Shortest Path Finding on Terrain Surfaces	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,314	Efficient Proximity Queries on Simplified Height Maps	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,156	Proximity Queries on Point Clouds using Rapid Construction Path Oracle	2024	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,380	EAR-Oracle: On Efficient Indexing for Distance Queries between Arbitrary Points on Terrain Surface	2023	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,993	Distance Oracle on Terrain Surface	2017	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
12,194	Terrain-Toolkit: A Multi-Functional Tool for Terrain Data	2014	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2	R-Trees: A Dynamic Index Structure For Spatial Searching	1984	SIGMOD	0.0020210012
28	Nearest Neighbor Queries	1995	SIGMOD	0.00052102434
449	Query Processing in Spatial Network Databases	2003	VLDB	0.0001826404
546	Influence Sets Based on Reverse Nearest Neighbor Queries	2000	SIGMOD	0.00016734556
665	Voronoi-Based K Nearest Neighbor Search for Spatial Network Databases	2004	VLDB	0.00015167291
1,281	Continuous Nearest Neighbor Search	2002	VLDB	0.00011349245

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	11,272	Efficient kNN Search in Public Transportation Networks	2024	VLDB
2	665	Voronoi-Based K Nearest Neighbor Search for Spatial Network Databases	2004	VLDB
3	8,532	New Lower and Upper Bounds for Shortest Distance Queries on Terrains	2016	VLDB
4	28	Nearest Neighbor Queries	1995	SIGMOD
5	10,460	High-Throughput k Nearest Neighbors Search in Road Networks	2026	SIGMOD
6	2,629	Distance Indexing on Road Networks	2006	VLDB
7	5,987	Progressive Top-K Nearest Neighbors Search in Large Road Networks	2020	SIGMOD
8	8,537	Finding Shortest Paths on Terrains by Killing Two Birds with One Stone	2014	VLDB
9	8,731	Simpler is More: Efficient Top-K Nearest Neighbors Search on Large Road Networks	2024	VLDB
10	1,618	Continuous Monitoring of Nearest Neighbors on Land Surface	2009	VLDB