1.1 Introduction
Location of an object or a person is its geographical position on the earth with respect to a reference point. This information can be characterized by using a number of different representations and by giving granularity, accuracy and rate of change (velocity). Location is an important piece of information that relates to mobility. Mobility is an important feature of mobile environment. Better support for spatial query processing is given by GPS enabled mo- bile devices. As a foundation for Location based services, processing of spatial queries is gaining more relevance in mobile computing domain and is an important area of research. Spatial queries are mobile queries that operate on the location information of mobile devices. In spatial queries, either location information is explicitly or implicitly specified in the query or query is used to retrieve location information of mobile device. Accordingly we classify spatial queries into two: Location dependent query and Location aware query (Illari et al., 2006; Wolfson et al., 1998).
As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Research hypothesis and questions, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.
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