Storing routes in socio-spatial networks and supporting social-based route recommendation

Abstract

Cellular phones and GPS-based navigation systems allow recording the location history of users, to find places the users frequently visit and routes along which the users frequently travel. This provides associations between users and geographic entities. Considering these associations as edges that connect users of a social network to geographical entities on a spatial network yields an integrated socio-spatial network. Queries over a socio-spatial network glean information on users, in correspondence with their location history, and retrieve geographical entities in association with the users who frequently visit these entities. In this paper we present a graph model for socio-spatial networks that store information on frequently traveled routes. We present a query language that consists of graph traversal operations, aiming at facilitating the formulation of queries, and we show how queries over the network can be evaluated efficiently. We also show how social-based route recommendation can be implemented using our query language. We describe an implementation of the suggested model over a graph-based database system and provide an experimental evaluation, to illustrate the effectiveness of our model.