RegionRank: A new approach for creating web search services

Abstract

The aspects and ideas behind the RegionRank software are presented. The project aims to provide a whole new approach to searching geographical and related data on the Internet. RegionRank is a map service based web application. It generates results for queries containing multiple criteria and displays these results on a heatmap. In this way, the user can easily select the areas which are the best match for the given query. The user can choose from multiple aspects to build the query, and there is a possibility for setting the importance of these aspects by associating different weight values to each corresponding criterion. A significant difference between RegionRank and other map-based web applications is that it extends the concept of POI (Point of Interest) and introduces the ROI (Region of Interest) concept. In this way not only points, but also regions can be defined and searched by the application. Furthermore, in the framework of the application there is a possibility for using the classical searching approach and data representation. The ROIs can be visualized on the map and clustering algorithms will be used for view optimization. RegionRank provides a unified API for handling data originating from different data providers, supports different formats, being easily extensible to integrate new data sources.