Top-k Neighborhood Dominating Query

In many real-life applications, spatial objects are associated with multiple non-spatial attributes. For example, a hotel may have price and rating in addition to its geographic location. In traditional spatial databases, spatial objects are often ranked solely based on their distance to a given query location, e.g., in a nearest neighbor search. In another line of research, domination based skyline queries are used to return best objects according to multi-criteria on non-spatial attributes. In this paper, we study how to rank spatial objects with respect to their non-spatial attributes within their spatial neighborhoods. To enable a general ranking, we design a ranking function that inherits the advantages of dominance relationship and integrates them with spatial proximity. Further, we propose an effective index structure, and a branch and bound solution that executes the ranking efficiently via the index. We conduct extensive empirical studies on real and synthetic datasets. The results demonstrate the high efficiency of our proposal compared to straightforward alternatives