Processing Spatial Keyword Query as a Top-k Aggregation Query

We examine the spatial keyword search problem to retrieve objects of interest that are ranked based on both their spatial proximity to the query location as well as the textual relevance of the object's keywords. Existing solutions for the problem are based on either using a combination of textual and spatial indexes or using specialized hybrid indexes that integrate the indexing of both textual and spatial attribute values. In this paper, we propose a new approach that is based on modeling the problem as a top-k aggregation problem which enables the design of a scalable and efficient solution that is based on the ubiquitous inverted list index. Our performance study demonstrates that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art hybrid methods by a wide margin.