Indexing High-Dimensional Spaces: Database Support for Next Decade's Applications

Stefan Berchtold, Daniel A. Keim

Abstract: Summary form only given. The tutorial is structured as follows: In the first section, we describe two examples of new database applications, which demonstrate the need for efficient query processing techniques in highdimensional spaces. In the second section, we discuss the effects occurring in high-dimensional spaces - first from a pure mathematical point of view and then from a database perspective. Next, we describe the different approaches for modeling the costs of processing queries on high-dimensional data. The description of the different approaches demonstrates nicely what happens if we ignore the special properties of high-dimensional spaces. In the fourth section, we then provide a structured overview of the proposed querying and indexing techniques, discussing their advantages and drawbacks. In this section, we also cover a number of additional techniques dealing with optimization and parallelization. In concluding the tutorial, we try to stir further research activities by presenting a number of interesting research problems.