An empirical study of the limitations of Minimum Bounding Boxes for defining the extent of geospatial resources: the use of DGGS and other alternatives for improving the performance of spatial searches

A Minimum Bounding Box (MBB) is a rectangle which bounds a geographic feature or dataset. It is commonly used in spatial information systems as a simplified way of describing the spatial extent of a resource. MBBs are typically indexed for searching and discovering resources relevant to a given geographic area of interest. However, this simplification leads to a loss of precision in the description of the extent and can affect the overall precision of the search results.We propose an alternative technique for describing the spatial extent based on the use of DGGS tiles. To measure the precision improvements offered by our method, we designed and implemented an empirical method for evaluating the average precision, and applied it to three different systems: one based on MBB, another on Convex Hull, and ours based on DGGS.The three methods were evaluated with the same test collection obtained from some of the main European geospatial data catalogues from the INSPIRE directive.The results showed that our method outperformed the other two.Where the catalogue average precision of the MBB search scenarios is between 73% and 97%, the DGGS is between 96% and 99%. Additionally, we propose a realistic method of transitioning from the current technologies to the technology we are proposing, considering the current state of the spatial data infrastructures.