Query Processing in Location-Based Social Networks

The widespread proliferation of location-acquisition techniques and GPS-embedded mobile devices resulted in the generation of geo-tagged data at unprecedented scale and have essentially enhanced the user experience in location-based services associated with social networks. Such location-based social networks allow people to record and share their location and are a rich source of information which can be exploited to study people's various attributes and characteristics and can provide various Geo-Social (GS) services. In this demonstration, we propose a new type of query called Top-k Geo-Social (TGS) query, which enriches the semantics of the conventional spatial query by introducing a social relevance attribute. Similarly, users formulate their TGS queries and view the results through browser-based client side interface. On the server side, three approaches namely, 1) Social-First 2) Spatial-First and 3) Hybrid are proposed to efficiently process TGS queries.