Finding the optimal location and keywords in obstructed and unobstructed space

The problem of optimal location selection based on reverse k nearest neighbor (RkNN) queries has been extensively studied in spatial databases. In this work, we present a related query, denoted as a Maximized Bichromatic Reverse Spatial Textual k Nearest Neighbor (MaxST) query, that finds an optimal location and a set of keywords for an object so that the object is a kNN object for as many users as possible. Such a query has many practical applications including advertisements, where the query is to find the location and the text contents to include in an advertisement so that it is relevant to the maximum number of users. The visibility of the advertisements also has an important role in the users' interests. In this work, we address two instances of the spatial relevance when ranking items: (1) the Euclidean distance and (2) the visibility. We carefully design a series of index structures and approaches to answer the MaxST for both instances. Specifically, we present (1) the Grp-topk approach that requires the computation of the top-k objects for all of the users first and then applies various pruning techniques to find the optimal location and keywords; (2) the Indiv-U approach, where we use similarity estimations to avoid computing the top-k objects of the users that cannot be a final result; and (3) the Index-U approach where we propose a hierarchical index structure over the users to improve pruning. We show that the keyword selection component in MaxST queries is NP-hard and present both approximate and exact solutions for the problem

Efficient query processing on spatial and textual data: beyond individual queries

With the increasing popularity of GPS enabled mobile devices, queries with locational intent are quickly becoming the most common type of search task on the web. This development has driven several research work on efficient processing of spatial and spatial-textual queries in the past few decades. While most of the existing work focus on answering queries independently, e.g., one query at a time, many real-life applications require the processing of multiple queries in a short period of time, and can benefit from sharing computations. This thesis focuses on efficient processing of the queries on spatial and spatial-textual data for the applications where multiple queries are of interest. Specifically, the following queries are studied: (i) batch processing of top-k spatial-textual queries; (ii) optimal location and keyword selection queries; and (iii) top-m rank aggregation on streaming spatial queries. The batch processing of queries is motivated from different application scenarios that require computing the result of multiple queries efficiently, including (i) multiple-query optimization, where the overall efficiency and throughput can be improved by grouping or partitioning a large set of queries; and (ii) continuous processing of a query stream, where in each time slot, the queries that have arrived can be processed together. In this thesis, given a set of top-k spatial-textual queries, the problem of computing the results for all the queries concurrently and efficiently as a batch is addressed. Some applications require an aggregation over the results of multiple queries. An exam- ple application is to identify the optimal value of attributes (e.g., location, text) for a new facility/service, so that the facility will appear in the query result of the maximum number of potential customers. This problem is essentially an aggregation (maximization) over the results of queries issued by multiple potential customers, where each user can be treated as a top-k query. In this thesis, we address this problem for spatial and textual data where the computations for multiple users are shared to find the final result. Rank aggregation is the problem of combining multiple rank orderings to produce a single ordering of the objects. Thus, aggregating the ranks of spatial objects can provide key insights into the importance of the objects in many different scenarios. This translates into a natural extension of the problem that finds the top-m objects with the highest aggregate rank over multiple queries. As the users issue new queries, clearly the rank aggregations continuously change over time, and recency also play an important role when interpreting the final results. The top-m rank aggregation of spatial objects for streaming queries is studied in this thesis, where the problem is to report the updated top-m objects with the highest aggregate rank over a subset of the most recent queries from a stream