General spatial skyline operator

With the emergence of location-aware mobile device technologies, communication technologies and GPS systems, various location-aware queries have attracted great attentions in the database literature. In many user recommendation systems, the spatial preference query is used to suggest the objects based on their spatial proximity to the facilities. In this paper, we study the problem of general spatial skyline which can provide a minimal set of candidates that contain optimal solutions for any monotonic distance based spatial preference query. An efficient algorithm is proposed to significantly reduce the number of non-promising objects in the computation. The paper also covers a comprehensive performance study of the proposed techniques based on both real and synthetic data. © 2012 Springer-Verlag