Towards location-based social networking services

Social networking applications have become very important web services that provide Internet-based platforms for their users to interact with their friends. With the advances in the location-aware hardware and software technologies, location-based social networking applications have been proposed to provide services for their users, taking into account both the spatial and social aspects. Unfortunately, none of existing location-based social networking applications is a holistic system nor equips database management systems to support scalable location-based social networking services. In this paper, we present GeoSocialDB; a holistic system providing three location-based social networking services, namely, location-based news feed, location-based news ranking, and location-based recommendation. In GeoSocialDB, we aim to implement these services as query operators inside a database engine to optimize the query processing performance. Within the GeoSocialDB framework, we discuss research challenges and directions towards the realization of scalable and practical query processing for location-based social networking services. In general, we discuss the challenges in designing location- and/or rank-aware query operators, materializing query answers, supporting continuous query processing, and providing privacy-aware query processing for our three location-based social networking services.