The proliferation of the Web 2.0 and the ubiquitousness of social media yield a huge flood of heterogenous data that is voluntarily published and shared by billions of individual users all over the world. As a result, the representation of an entity (such as a real person) in this data may consist of various data types, including location and other numeric attributes, textual descriptions, images, videos, social network information and other types of information. Searching similar entities in this multi-enriched data exploiting the information of multiple representations simultaneously promises to yield more interesting and relevant information than searching among each data type individually. While efficient similarity search on single representations is a well studied problem, existing studies lacks appropriate solutions for multi-enriched data taking into account the combination of all representations as a whole. In this paper, we address the problem of index-supported similarity search on multi-enriched (a.k.a. multi-represented) objects based on a set of metrics, one metric for each representation. We define multimetric similarity search queries by employing user-defined weight function specifying the impact of each metric at query time. Our main contribution is an index structure which combines all metrics into a single multi-dimensional access method that works for arbitrary weights preferences. The experimental evaluation shows that our proposed index structure is more efficient than existing multi-metric access methods considering different cost criteria and tremendously outperforms traditional approaches when querying very large sets of multi-enriched objects.

Directions and paths, as commonly provided by route guidance systems, are usually derived considering absolute metrics, e.g., finding the shortest path within the underlying road network. This demo presents a framework which uses crowdsourced geospatial data to obtain paths that do not only minimize travel time but also guide users along popular points of interest (POIs). By analyzing textual travel blog data and Flickr data, we define a measure for popularity of POIs. This measure is used as an additional cost criterion in the underlying road network graph. Furthermore, we propose an approach to reduce the problem of finding paths which maximize popularity while minimizing travel time to the computation of bicriterion pareto optimal paths. The presented framework allows users to specify origin and destination within a road network, returning the set of pareto optimal paths or a subset thereof if a desired number of POIs along the path has been specified. Each of the returned routes is enriched with representative Flickr images and textual information from travel blogs. The framework and its results show that the computed paths yield competitive solutions in terms of travel time while also providing more “popular” paths, making routing easier and more informative for the user.

This demonstration presents our Uncertain-Spatio-Temporal (UST)} framework that we have developed in recent years. The framework allows not only to visualize and explore spatio-temporal data consisting of (location, time, object)-triples but also provides an extensive codebase easily extensible and customizable by developers and researchers. The main research focus of this UST-framework is the explicit consideration of uncertainty, an aspect that is inherent in spatio-temporal data, due to infrequent position updates, due to physical limitations and due to power constraints. The UST-framework can be used to obtain a deeper intuition of the quality of spatio-temporal data models. Such models aim at estimating the position of a spatio-temporal object at a time where the object's position is not explicitly known, for example by using both historic (traffic-) pattern information, and by using explicit observations of objects. The UST-framework illustrates the resulting distributions by allowing a user to move forward and backward in time. Additionally the framework allows users to specify simple spatio-temporal queries, such as spatio-temporal window queries and spatio-temporal nearest neighbor (NN) queries. Based on recently published theoretic concepts, the UST-framework allows to visually explore the impact of different models and parameters on spatio-temporal data. The main result showcased by the UST-framework is a minimization of uncertainty by employing stochastic processes, leading to small expected distances between ground truth trajectories and modelled positions.