Efficient techniques for range search queries on earth science data

We consider the problem of organizing large scale earth science raster data to efficiently handle queries for identifying regions whose parameters fall within certain range values specified by the queries. This problem seems to be critical to enabling basic data mining tasks such as determining associations between physical phenomena and spatial factors, detecting changes and trends, and content based retrieval. We assume that the input is too large to fit in internal memory and hence focus on data structures and algorithms that minimize the I/O bounds. A new data structure, called a tree-of-regions (ToR), is introduced and involves a combination of an R-tree and efficient representation of regions. It is shown that such a data structure enables the handling of range queries in an optimal I/O time, under certain reasonable assumptions. We also show that updates to the ToR can be handled efficiently. Experimental results for a variety of multi-valued earth science data illustrate the fast execution times of a wide range of queries, as predicted by our theoretical analysis.