We propose a novel system, called Lamps (Location-Aware Moving Top-k Pub/Sub), which continuously monitors the top-k most relevant spatio-textual objects for a large number of moving top-k spatio-textual subscriptions simultaneously. Lamps employs the concept of a safe region to monitor top-k results. However, unlike with existing works that assume static objects, top-k result updates may be triggered by newly generated objects. To continuously monitor the top-k results for massive moving subscriptions efficiently, we propose SQ-tree, a novel index based on safe regions, to filter subscriptions whose top-k results do not change. Moreover, to reduce the expensive cost of safe region re-evaluation, we develop a novel approximation technique for safe region construction. Our experimental results on real datasets show that Lamps achieves higher performance than baseline approaches.

Location-based services are becoming more involved with our daily lives, so many works have considered efficiently retrieving useful objects from spatial-keyword databases. These works are promising on the user sides, but none of them considers the service provider sides. To gain profits and enrich recommendation lists, service providers conduct market analyses and want to know potential users who may be interested in their services. In this paper, to satisfy this requirement, we propose a new query, approximate reverse top-k spatial-keyword (ART) query. Given a set O of spatial-keyword objects, a set S of users (their locations and preferable keywords), a query object q, k, and an approximation ratio ϵ, an ART query retrieves such users that q is included in their approximate top-k results among O and q. A straightforward approach to processing this query is to run a top-k spatial-keyword search for each user in S. This is clearly expensive, as the number of users is generally large. We therefore propose PART, an efficient algorithm for ART query processing. In addition, we propose B-PART, which enables the processing of multiple ART queries in a batch. We conduct extensive experiments using real datasets, and the results demonstrate the efficiencies of our algorithms.

Huge amounts of spatio-textual objects, such as geo-tagged tweets, are being generated at an unprecedented scale, leading to a variety of applications such as location-based recommendation and sponsored search. Many of these applications need to support moving top-k spatio-textual subscriptions. For example, while walking, a tourist issues a moving subscription and looks for top-k advertisements published by nearby shops. Unfortunately, existing methods that monitor the results of spatio-textual subscriptions support only static top-k subscriptions or moving boolean subscriptions. In this article, we propose a novel system, called Lamps (Location-Aware Moving Top-k Pub/Sub), which continuously monitors the top-k most relevant spatio-textual objects for a large number of moving top-k spatio-textual subscriptions simultaneously. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of a location-aware moving top-k pub/sub system. As with existing works on continuous moving top-k subscription processing, Lamps employs the concept of a safe region to monitor top-k results. However, unlike with existing works that assume static objects, top-k result updates may be triggered by newly generated objects. To continuously monitor the top-k results for massive moving subscriptions efficiently, we propose SQ-tree, a novel index based on safe regions, to filter subscriptions whose top-k results do not change. Moreover, to reduce the expensive cost of safe region re-evaluation, we develop a novel approximation technique for safe region construction. Our experimental results on real datasets show that Lamps achieves higher performance than baseline approaches.

Recent applications employ publish/subscribe (Pub/Sub) systems so that publishers can easily receive attentions of customers and subscribers can monitor useful information generated by publishers. Due to the prevalence of smart devices and social networking services, a large number of objects that contain both spatial and keyword information have been generated continuously, and the number of subscribers also continues to increase. This poses a challenge to Pub/Sub systems: they need to continuously extract useful information from massive objects for each subscriber in real time.