Querying open street map with XQuery

Abstract

In this paper we present a library for querying Open Street Map (OSM) with XQuery. This library is based on the well-known spatial operators defined by Clementini and Egenhofer, providing a repertoire of XQuery functions which encapsulate the search on the XML document representing a layer of OSM, and make the definition of queries on top of OSM layers easy. In essence, the library provides a repertoire of OSM Operators for points and lines which, in combination with Higher Order facilities of XQuery, facilitates the composition of queries and the definition of keyword based search geo-localized queries. OSM data are indexed by an R-tree structure, in which points and lines are enclosed by Minimum Bounding Rectangles (MBRs), in order to get shorter answer time.