Query Relaxation and Result Ranking for Uncertain Spatiotemporal XML Data

Due to the widespread uses of uncertain spatiotemporal data, web ordinary users have access to query these data in various ways. However, users often cannot accurately give query constraints so that the query results may be empty or very few. Traditional algorithms cannot be used to deal with uncertain spatiotemporal data because they have no relaxation query on spatiotemporal attributes. Therefore, in this paper, the authors propose new flexible query algorithms, which add relaxation query processing for spatiotemporal attributes. Considering that XML has great advantages in exchanging and representing spatiotemporal data, they propose an uncertain spatiotemporal data model based on XML. According to the different number of relaxing attributes, they give SingleRelaxation algorithm and MultipleRelaxation algorithm. In addition, a T-List structure is designed to quickly locate the nodes' positions of uncertain spatiotemporal data, and RSort algorithm is proposed to sort accurate query results and extended query results. The experimental results show the superiority of the approach.