EPIX – Efficient Ptolemaic Indexing

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Beecks
• Subject Area: Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems
• Term: from 2021 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 454630593

Concomitant with the rapid growth of heterogeneous data, the demand for efficient and scalable data access increases. Ptolemaic Access Methods provide a domain-agnostic approach for indexing and accessing complex data spaces based on metric similarity models. While initial studies have already demonstrated the efficiency of this comparatively young indexing method in various data-intensive domains, the fundamentals of this approach are largely unexplored. Questions concerning the approximation of distances in metric and ptolemaic data spaces, the geometry of ptolemaic queries, as well as the interaction of different lower bounding methods are currently considered to be not sufficiently answered. The aim of this research project is to investigate the fundamentals of ptolemaic and metric access methods and to methodically advance the findings obtained in order to demonstrate the performance of this class of access methods for indexing large, complex data spaces. This research project thus pursues the overall goal of advancing the development of efficient data technologies for exploring digital data resources.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants