Density-based spatial keyword querying

With the rocket development of the Internet, WWW(World Wide Web), mobile computing and GPS (Global Positioning System) services, location-based services like Web GIS (Geographical Information System) portals are becoming more and more popular. Spatial keyword queries over GIS spatial data receive much more attention from both academic and industry communities than ever before. In general, a spatial keyword query containing spatial location information and keywords is to locate a set of spatial objects that satisfy the location condition and keyword query semantics. Researchers have proposed many solutions to various spatial keyword queries such as top-K keyword query, reversed kNN keyword query, moving object keyword query, collective keyword query, etc. In this paper, we propose a density-based spatial keyword query which is to locate a set of spatial objects that not only satisfies the query's textual and distance condition, but also has a high density in their area. We use the collective keyword query semantics to find in a dense area, a group of spatial objects whose keywords collectively match the query keywords. To efficiently process the density based spatial keyword query, we use an IR-tree index as the base data structure to index spatial objects and their text contents and define a cost function over the IR-tree indexing nodes to approximately compute the density information of areas. We design a heuristic algorithm that can efficiently prune the region according to both the distance and region density in processing a query over the IR-tree index. Experimental results on datasets show that our method achieves desired results with high performance. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.