Query Processing in Location-Based Social Networks

The widespread proliferation of location-acquisition techniques and GPS -embedded mobile devices resulted in the generation of geo-tagged data at unprecedented scale and have essentially enhanced the user experience in locationbased services associated with social networks. Such locationbased social networks allow people to record and share their location and are a rich source of information which can be exploited to study people’s various attributes and characteristics and can provide various Geo-Social (GS) services. In this demonstration, we propose a new type of query called Top-k Geo-Social (TGS) query, which enriches the semantics of the conventional spatial query by introducing a social relevance attribute. Similarly, users formulate their TGS queries and view the results through browser-based client side interface. On the server side, three approaches namely, 1) Social-First 2) Spatial-First and 3) Hybrid are proposed to efficiently process TGS queries.