Reverse Top-k geo-social keyword queries in road networks

Identifying prospective customers is an important aspect of marketing research. In this paper, we provide support for a new type of query, the Reverse Top-k Geo-Social Keyword (RkGSK) query. This query takes into account spatial, textual, and social information, and finds prospective customers for geotagged objects. As an example, a restaurant manager might apply the query to find prospective customers. To address this, we propose a hybrid index, the GIM-Tree, which indexes locations, keywords, and social information of geo-Tagged users and objects, and then, using the GIM-Tree, we present efficient RkGSK query processing algorithms that exploit several pruning strategies. The effectiveness of RkGSK retrieval is characterized via a case study, and extensive experiments using real datasets offer insight into the efficiency of the proposed index and algorithms.