Joint Top-K Spatial Keyword Query Processing

Web users and content are increasingly being geopositioned, and increased focus is being given to serving local content in response to web queries. This development calls for spatial keyword queries that take into account both the locations and textual descriptions of content. We study the efficient, joint processing of multiple top-k spatial keyword queries. Such joint processing is attractive during high query loads and also occurs when multiple queries are used to obfuscate a user's true query. We propose a novel algorithm and index structure for the joint processing of top-k spatial keyword queries. Empirical studies show that the proposed solution is efficient on real data sets. We also offer analytical studies on synthetic data sets to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed solution.