Spatial query processing for location based application on Hbase

With the proliferation of location detected devices, such as mobile phone and GPS etc, the location data has increased dramatically in the past decades, which is a challenge for traditional storage mode. How to efficiently store, manage and access to these spatial data becomes the research focus. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial index structure using Geohash encoding over the distributed database HBase. Geohash is a latitude and longitude geocode system, which can convert the latitude and longitude information into an one-dimensional encoding string. With the proposed index structure, the kNN and region queries algorithms are designed. Finally, an experimental study on real datasets is made on HBase cluster, and the experiment results show that our proposed index structure and algorithms are effective and efficient in spatial queries processing of big data.