Lisi Chen

Spatial keyword query processing: an experimental evaluation

Geo-textual indices play an important role in spatial keyword querying. The existing geo-textual indices have not been compared systematically under the same experimental framework. This makes it difficult to determine which indexing technique best supports specific functionality. We provide an all-around survey of 12 state-of-the-art geo-textual indices. We propose a benchmark that enables the comparison of the spatial keyword query performance. We also report on the findings obtained when applying the benchmark to the indices, thus uncovering new insights that may guide index selection as well as further research.

Spatial keyword querying

The web is increasingly being used by mobile users. In addition, it is increasingly becoming possible to accurately geo-position mobile users and web content. This development gives prominence to spatial web data management. Specifically, a spatial keyword query takes a user location and user-supplied keywords as arguments and returns web objects that are spatially and textually relevant to these arguments. This paper reviews recent results by the authors that aim to achieve spatial keyword querying functionality that is easy to use, relevant to users, and can be supported efficiently. The paper covers different kinds of functionality as well as the ideas underlying their definition.

Temporal Spatial-Keyword Top-k publish/subscribe

Massive amount of data that are geo-tagged and associated with text information are being generated at an unprecedented scale. These geo-textual data cover a wide range of topics. Users are interested in receiving up-to-date tweets such that their locations are close to a user specified location and their texts are interesting to users. For example, a user may want to be updated with tweets near her home on the topic “food poisoning vomiting.” We consider the Temporal Spatial-Keyword Top-k Subscription (TaSK) query. Given a TaSK query, we continuously maintain up-to-date top-k most relevant results over a stream of geo-textual objects (e.g., geo-tagged Tweets) for the query. The TaSK query takes into account text relevance, spatial proximity, and recency of geo-textual objects in evaluating its relevance with a geo-textual object. We propose a novel solution to efficiently process a large number of TaSK queries over a stream of geotextual objects. We evaluate the efficiency of our approach on two real-world datasets and the experimental results show that our solution is able to achieve a reduction of the processing time by 70-80% compared with two baselines.

Diversity-Aware Top-k Publish/Subscribe for Text Stream

Massive amount of text data are being generated by a huge number of web users at an unprecedented scale. These data cover a wide range of topics. Users are interested in receiving a few up-to-date representative documents (e.g., tweets) that can provide them with a wide coverage of different aspects of their query topics. To address the problem, we consider the Diversity-Aware Top-k Subscription (DAS) query. Given a DAS query, we continuously maintain an up-to-date result set that contains k most recently returned documents over a text stream for the query. The DAS query takes into account text relevance, document recency, and result diversity. We propose a novel solution to efficiently processing a large number of DAS queries over a stream of documents. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on real-world dataset and the experimental results show that our solution is able to achieve a reduction of the processing time by 60--75% compared with two baselines. We also study the effectiveness of the DAS query.

Trajectory similarity join in spatial networks

The matching of similar pairs of objects, called similarity join, is fundamental functionality in data management. We consider the case of trajectory similarity join (TS-Join), where the objects are trajectories of vehicles moving in road networks. Thus, given two sets of trajectories and a threshold θ, the TS-Join returns all pairs of trajectories from the two sets with similarity above θ. This join targets applications such as trajectory near-duplicate detection, data cleaning, ridesharing recommendation, and traffic congestion prediction. With these applications in mind, we provide a purposeful definition of similarity. To enable efficient TS-Join processing on large sets of trajectories, we develop search space pruning techniques and take into account the parallel processing capabilities of modern processors. Specifically, we present a two-phase divide-and-conquer algorithm. For each trajectory, the algorithm first finds similar trajectories. Then it merges the results to achieve a final result. The algorithm exploits an upper bound on the spatiotemporal similarity and a heuristic scheduling strategy for search space pruning. The algorithms per-trajectory searches are independent of each other and can be performed in parallel, and the merging has constant cost. An empirical study with real data offers insight in the performance of the algorithm and demonstrates that is capable of outperforming a well-designed baseline algorithm by an order of magnitude.

Topic Exploration in Spatio-Temporal Document Collections

Huge amounts of data with both spatial and temporal information (e.g., geo-tagged tweets) are being generated, and are often used to share and spread personal updates, spontaneous ideas, and breaking news. We refer to such data as spatio-temporal documents. It is of great interest to explore topics in a collection of spatio-temporal documents. In this paper, we study the problem of efficiently mining topics from spatio-temporal documents within a user specified bounded region and timespan, to provide users with insights about events, trends, and public concerns within the specified region and time period. We propose a novel algorithm that is able to efficiently combine two pre-trained topic models learnt from two document sets with a bounded error, based on which we develop an efficient approach to mining topics from a large number of spatio-temporal documents within a region and a timespan. Our experimental results show that our approach is able to improve the runtime by at least an order of magnitude compared with the baselines. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of our proposed method is close to the baselines.

KORS: Keyword-aware Optimal Route Search System

We present the Keyword-aware Optimal Route Search System (KORS), which efficiently answers the KOR queries. A KOR query is to find a route such that it covers a set of user-specified keywords, a specified budget constraint is satisfied, and an objective score of the route is optimized. Consider a tourist who wants to spend a day exploring a city. The user may issue the following KOR query: “find the most popular route such that it passes by shopping mall, restaurant, and pub, and the travel time to and from her hotel is within 4 hours.” KORS provides browser-based interfaces for desktop and laptop computers and provides a client application for mobile devices as well. The interfaces and the client enable users to formulate queries and view the query results on a map. Queries are then sent to the server for processing by the HTTP post operation. Since answering a KOR query is NP-hard, we devise two approximation algorithms with provable performance bounds and one greedy algorithm to process the KOR queries in our KORS prototype. We use two real-world datasets to demonstrate the functionality and performance of this system.

Dynamic Shortest Path Monitoring in Spatial Networks

With the increasing availability of real-time traffic information, dynamic spatial networks are pervasive nowadays and path planning in dynamic spatial networks becomes an important issue. In this light, we propose and investigate a novel problem of dynamically monitoring shortest paths in spatial networks (DSPM query). When a traveler aims to a destination, his/her shortest path to the destination may change due to two reasons: 1) the travel costs of some edges have been updated and 2) the traveler deviates from the pre-planned path. Our target is to accelerate the shortest path computing in dynamic spatial networks, and we believe that this study may be useful in many mobile applications, such as route planning and recommendation, car navigation and tracking, and location-based services in general. This problem is challenging due to two reasons: 1) how to maintain and reuse the existing computation results to accelerate the following computations, and 2) how to prune the search space effectively. To overcome these challenges, filter-and-refinement paradigm is adopted. We maintain an expansion tree and define a pair of upper and lower bounds to prune the search space. A series of optimization techniques are developed to accelerate the shortest path computing. The performance of the developed methods is studied in extensive experiments based on real spatial data.

Parallel trajectory similarity joins in spatial networks

The matching of similar pairs of objects, called similarity join, is fundamental functionality in data management. We consider two cases of trajectory similarity joins (TS-Joins), including a threshold-based join (Tb-TS-Join) and a top-k TS-Join (k-TS-Join), where the objects are trajectories of vehicles moving in road networks. Given two sets of trajectories and a threshold