The rapid growth of GPS-enabled mobile devices has popularized many location-based applications. Spatial keyword search which finds objects of interest by considering both spatial locations and textual descriptions has become very useful in these applications. The recent integration of social data with spatial keyword search opens a new service horizon for users. Few previous studies have proposed methods to combine spatial keyword queries with social data in Euclidean space. However, most real-world applications constrain the distance between query location and data objects by a road network, where distance between two points is defined by the shortest connecting path. This paper proposes geo-social top-k keyword queries and geo-social skyline keyword queries on road networks. Both queries enrich traditional spatial keyword query semantics by incorporating social relevance component. We formalize the proposed query types and appropriate indexing frameworks and algorithms to efficiently process them. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches are evaluated using real datasets.
Keywords: geo-social queries; location-based social networks; skyline queries; top-k spatial keyword queries.