Towards an Efficient Integration of Spatial Join Queries and IR-style Keyword Search

Recently, with the amount of available textual data in spatial databases growing rapidly, more and more applications are required to support both spatial joins and keyword-based text information retrieval. In this paper, we discuss a new type of query, called as SJIRKS, which efficiently integrates spatial join on spatial data and IR-style keyword search on textual data. In particular, the proposed SJ-IRKS queries return users with the most interesting spatial object pairs by adapting state-of-the-art information retrieval (IR) relevance ranking strategies. For answering SJ-IRKS queries efficiently, we present a pipeline algorithm named PL*SJ-IRKS which outputs the results in an incremental way. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithm has superior performance and excellent scalability.