Spatial keyword range search on trajectories

Abstract

With advances in geo-positioning technologies and ensuing location based service, there are a rapid growing amount of trajectories associated with textual information collected in many emerging applications. For instance, nowadays many people are used to sharing interesting experience through Foursquare or Twitter along their travel routes. In this paper, we investigate the problem of spatial keyword range search on trajectories, which is essential to make sense of large amount of trajectory data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically investigate range search over trajectories where three important aspects, i.e., spatio, temporal and textual, are all taken into consideration. Given a query region, a timespan and a set of keywords, we aim to retrieve trajectories that go through this region during query timespan, and contain all the query keywords. To facilitate the range search, a novel index structure called IOC-Tree is proposed based on the inverted indexing and octree techniques to effectively explore the spatio, temporal and textual pruning techniques. Furthermore, this structure can also support the query with order-sensitive keywords. Comprehensive experiments on several real-life datasets are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency.