Spatial Keyword Querying

The web is increasingly being used by mobile users. In addition, it is increasingly becoming possible to accurately geo-position mobile users and web content. This development gives prominence to spatial web data management. Specifically, a spatial keyword query takes a user location and user-supplied keywords as arguments and returns web objects that are spatially and textually relevant to these arguments. This paper reviews recent results by the authors that aim to achieve spatial keyword querying functionality that is easy to use, relevant to users, and can be supported efficiently. The paper covers different kinds of functionality as well as the ideas underlying their definition.