Spatial-aware interest group queries in location-based social networks

Abstract

Location-based social networks, such as Foursquare and Facebook Places, are bridging the gap between the physical world and online social networking services through acquired user locations. Some social networks released check-in services that allow users to share their visiting locations with their friends. In this paper, users' interests are modeled by check-in actions. We propose a new spatial-aware interest group (SIG) query that retrieves a user group of size k where every user is highly interested in the query keyword and also spatially close to each other. An efficient algorithm AIR based on the IR-tree is proposed for the processing of SIG queries. Furthermore, an optimization is developed and achieves a much better performance than the baseline algorithm.