Oracle Spatial User's Guide and Reference - InfoLab

Spatial Information and Data Mining Applications
high incomes are more likely to watch a particular television program or to respond
favorably to a particular advertising solicitation.
Effective with Oracle Database 10g, spatial data can be materialized for inclusion in
data mining applications. For example, ODM might enable you to discover that
sales prospects with addresses located in specific areas (neighborhoods, cities, or
regions) are more likely to watch a particular television program or to respond
favorably to a particular advertising solicitation. (The addresses are geocoded into
longitude/latitude points and stored in an Oracle Spatial geometry object.)
In many applications, data at a specific location is influenced by data in the
neighborhood. For example, the value of a house is largely determined by the value
of other houses in the neighborhood. This phenomenon is called spatial correlation
(or, neighborhood influence), and is discussed further in Section 8.3. The spatial
analysis and mining features in Oracle Spatial let you exploit spatial correlation by
using the location attributes of data items in several ways: for binning (discretizing)
data into regions (such as categorizing data into northern, southern, eastern, and
western regions), for materializing the influence of neighborhood (such as number
of customers within a two-mile radius of each store), and for identifying colocated
data items (such as video rental stores and pizza restaurants).
To perform spatial data mining, you materialize spatial predicates and relationships
for a set of spatial data using thematic layers. Each layer contains data about a
specific kind of spatial data (that is, having a specific "theme"), for example, parks
and recreation areas, or demographic income data. The spatial materialization could
be performed as a preprocessing step before the application of data mining
techniques, or it could be performed as an intermediate step in spatial mining, as
shown in Figure 8–1.
8-2 Oracle Spatial User’s Guide and Reference