Retrieving Top-k Prestige-Based Relevant Spatial Web Objects

The location-aware keyword query returns ranked objects that are near a query location and that have textual descriptions that match query keywords. This query occurs inherently in many types of mobile and traditional web services and applications, e.g., Yellow Pages and Maps services. Previous work considers the potential results of such a query as being independent when ranking them. However, a relevant result object with nearby objects that are also relevant to the query is likely to be preferable over a relevant object without relevant nearby objects. The paper proposes the concept of prestige-based relevance to capture both the textual relevance of an object to a query and the effects of nearby objects. Based on this, a new type of query, the Location-aware top-k Prestige-based Text retrieval (LkPT) query, is proposed that retrieves the top-k spatial web objects ranked according to both prestige-based relevance and location proximity. We propose two algorithms that compute LkPT queries. Empirical studies with real-world spatial data demonstrate that LkPT queries are more effective in retrieving web objects than a previous approach that does not consider the effects of nearby objects; and they show that the proposed algorithms are scalable and outperform a baseline approach significantly.