Efficient continuous top-k spatial keyword queries on road networks

With the development of GPS-enabled mobile devices, more and more pieces of information on the web are geotagged. Spatial keyword queries, which consider both spatial locations and textual descriptions to find objects of interest, adapt well to this trend. Therefore, a considerable number of studies have focused on the interesting problem of efficiently processing spatial keyword queries. However, most of them assume Euclidean space or examine a single snapshot query only. This paper investigates a novel problem, namely, continuous top-k spatial keyword queries on road networks, for the first time. We propose two methods that can monitor such moving queries in an incremental manner and reduce repetitive traversing of network edges for better performance. Experimental evaluation using large real datasets demonstrates that the proposed methods both outperform baseline methods significantly. Discussion about the parameters affecting the efficiency of the two methods is also presented to reveal their relative advantages.