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From green@superliminal.com Fri Jul 19 02:55:40 2002
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Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 17:55:40 -0700
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To: Radim Blazek <blazek@itc.it>
Cc: antonin.guttman@informix.com
Subject: Re: R-Tree for GRASS
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hello radim,

i'm glad that you're finding my r-tree implementation useful. it should be noted
that i am not the original author. i got my original implementation directly from
toni gutman who i believe co-invented the technique with michael stonebrakier.
that implementation was the same one they'd originally written when testing and
benchmarking the technique. he was not proud of the original code and felt that
while it worked, it would have been better reimplemented from scratch. instead, i
upgraded and polished their code. another user discovered a flaw in the technique
and suggested a solution using bounding spheres which i then implemented. for
example, imagine you have the following three rectangles:
    0,0 to 1,0
    0,2 to 1,3
    1000000,0 to 1000001,0
if you want to partition them into two boxes, the original algorithm based only on
box volumes would have put the first rectangle in one box and the last two in
another. clearly a bad choice for most applications. the bounding sphere metric
would instead place the first two rectangles in one box and the third in another.
much better. it was definitely interesting to extend this to use n-dimensional
spheres, but it does generalize nicely.

your changes to NUMDIMS, and float to double are normal parameters you're expected
to customize. your changes to handle compiler warnings and printf are more
interesting to me. you didn't include your modified files, so i'd appreciate them
which i may use to update the archive. if you can, please make careful note of
your non-cosmetic fixes and improvements. i can't promise to update the archive
but it will at least be useful to have. more likely i'd convert the whole thing
into a nicely objectified java package but there's a good chance i'll never get
around to doing that.

regarding split_l.c vs. split_q.c: these involve a choice you can make between
speed and box optimization. you should use the quadratic version ('q') if it's
fast enough for your needs, and use the less expensive linear method if not. note
that in both cases various branches of the resulting rectangle trees may overlap.
there's another version of the technique called "R+ Trees" which guarantees no
overlaps, but i don't have an implementation of that version. i believe it's even
slower than either r-tree splitting method, so you should probably also take all
of that into account.

i did a quick search and found a citing of toni's work here:
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/g/Guttman:Antonin.html
for your grass header files, you should list toni's name as author, though i'd
appreciate mention of my updates to his code and technique.
you'll find the abstract of the paper here:
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/sigmod/Guttman84.html
and a home page for toni here:
http://es.ucsc.edu/~tonig/
note that you'll also find links to his original paper and implementation there.
i'm cc'ing him in case there's anything he'd like to add or correct; and also so
that if he likes, he can update his implementation with my updated sources. it's
been a very long time since i've talked with him so i hope that address is still
current.

finally, i have a question for you about grass: i've developed a technique based
on r-trees that allows interactive navigation of enormous polygonal 3d data sets.
it's been a solution in search of a problem. i know that some gis application
require such data sets and i'd love to communicate with any that you know of who
might need such a technique. it only works in static environments that are crowded
enough such that regardless of how the user navigates, only a very small fraction
of the entire data set are ever visible at once. it's obviously a very specialized
technique but it scales with the log of the number of polygons and may therefore
be very useful for applications with huge and ever-growing data sets.

-daniel

Radim Blazek wrote:

> Ciao,
>
> I want to use R-Tree http://www.superliminal.com/sources/RTree.zip
> as spatial index for GRASS (GPL GIS) http://grass.itc.it/index.html
>
> I tested just for line intersection function but want to use as general
> index for vectors. Library will be part of GRASS project, but may be
> extracted and compiled independently (Makefile.alone).
>
> I have done just few cosmetic changes so far (described in README.grass):
> - files converted to unix line ends
> - added file 'README.grass'
> - added Makefile
> - few modifications to get rid of compiler warnings, but warnings like:
>     index.c:277: warning: `tmp_nptr' might be used uninitialized in this f.
>     were left because need deeper revision if may cause problems, insetad of
>     blindly init to 0/NULL
> - '//' comments -> '/* */'
> - printf() - > fprintf(stdout,)
> - NUMDIMS set to 3
> - test.c 2D -> 3D
> - type RectReal: float -> double
>
> OK? (I hope so because you write: You're completely free to use them for any
> purpose whatsoever.)
>
> If you don't mind I would like to ask you if you recall
> how split_l.c and split_q.c differ and which should be used?
>
> Can I add headers to your files for GRASS?:
> /****************************************************************************
> * MODULE:       R-Tree library
> *
> * AUTHOR(S):    Daniel Green (dgreen@superliminal.com)
> *
> * PURPOSE:      Multidimensional index
> *
> * COPYRIGHT:    (C) 2001 by the GRASS Development Team
> *
> *               This program is free software under the GNU General Public
> *               License (>=v2). Read the file COPYING that comes with GRASS
> *               for details.
> *****************************************************************************/
>
> Thanks
>
> Radim