Modeling and Querying Moving Objects with Social Relationships

Current moving-object database (MOD) systems focus on management of movement data, but pay less attention to modelling social relationships between moving objects and spatial-temporal trajectories in an integrated manner. This paper combines moving-object database and social network systems and presents a novel data model called Geo-Social-Moving (GSM) that enables the unified management of trajectories, underlying geographical space and social relationships for mass moving objects. A bulk of user-defined data types and corresponding operators are also proposed to facilitate geo-social queries on moving objects. An implementation framework for the GSM model is proposed, and a prototype system based on native Neo4J is then developed with two real-world data sets from the location-based social network systems. Compared with solutions based on traditional extended relational database management systems characterized by time-consuming table join operations, the proposed GSM model characterized by graph traversal is argued to be more powerful in representing mass moving objects with social relationships, and more efficient and stable for geo-social querying.