Keyword Search in Spatial Databases: Towards Searching by Document

This work addresses a novel spatial keyword query called the m-closest keywords (mCK) query. Given a database of spatial objects, each tuple is associated with some descriptive information represented in the form of keywords. The mCK query aims to find the spatially closest tuples which match m user-specified keywords. Given a set of keywords from a document, mCK query can be very useful in geotagging the document by comparing the keywords to other geotagged documents in a database. To answer mCK queries efficiently, we introduce a new index called the bR*-tree, which is an extension of the R*-tree. Based on bR*-tree, we exploit a priori-based search strategies to effectively reduce the search space. We also propose two monotone constraints, namely the distance mutex and keyword mutex, as our a priori properties to facilitate effective pruning. Our performance study demonstrates that our search strategy is indeed efficient in reducing query response time and demonstrates remarkable sca...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Dongxiang Zhang, Yeow Meng Chee, Anirban Mondal, Anthony K. H. Tung, Masaru Kitsuregawa
• Keywords: Database, ICDE 2009, MCK Query, Query Keywords, Query Response Time, Spatial Keyword Query, User-specified Keywords