Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures

Hanan Samet is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, and a member of the Center for Automation Research and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He is widely published in the fields of spatial databases and data structures, computer graphics, image databases and image processing, and geographic information systems (GIS), and is considered an authority on the use and design of hierarchical spatial data structures such as the quadtree and octree for geographic information systems, image processing, and computer graphics. He is the author of the two books The Design and Analysis of Spatial Data Structures and Applications of Spatial Data Structures: Computer Graphics, Image Processing and GIS. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University.

Honorable Mention Award in the 2006 best book in Computer and Information Science competition from the Professional and Scholarly Publishers(PSP) Group of the American Publishers Association (AAP) “Hanan Samet is the dean of “spatial indexing”... This book is encyclopedic... this book will be invaluable for those of us who struggle with spatial data, scientific datasets, graphics, vision problems involving volumetric queries, or with higher dimensional datasets common in data mining.” —From the foreword by Jim Gray, Microsoft Research“Samet’s book on multidimensional and metric data structures is the most complete and thorough presentation on this topic. It has broad coverage of material from computational geometry, databases, graphics, GIS, and similarity retrieval literature. Written by the leading authority on hierarchical spatial representations, this book is a “must have” for all instructors, researchers, and developers working and teaching in these areas.” —Dinesh Manocha, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill“To summarize, this book is excellent! It’s a very comprehensive survey of spatial and multidimensional data structures and algorithms, which is badly needed. The breadth and depth of coverage is astounding and I would consider several parts of it required reading for real time graphics and game developers.” —Bretton Wade, University of Washington and Microsoft Corp.“It’s a truly encyclopedic book on data structures for accelerating all sorts of 3D queries.” —Hector Yee, Hectorgon – A Graphics Programming Blog, October 18, 2006

• Multidimensional data is data that exists and changes in more than one dimension, by time, or spatially, or both, sometimes dynamically. Think here of tracking hurricane data in order to project the storm's path, for just one example. As spatial and other multidimensional data structures become increasingly important for the applications in game programming, data mining, bioinformatics, and many other areas--including astronomy, geographic information systems, physics, etc., the need for a comprehensive book on the subject is paramount. This book is truly a life's work by the author who is clearly the best person for the job.