Querying Geo-Textual Data: Spatial Keyword Queries and Beyond

Over the past decade, we have moved from a predominantly desktop based web to a predominantly mobile web, where users most often access the web from mobile devices such as smartphones. In addition, we are witnessing a proliferation of geo-located, textual web content. Motivated in part by these developments, the research community has been hard at work enabling the efficient computation of a variety of query functionality on geo-textual data, yielding a sizable body of literature on the querying of geo-textual data. With a focus on different types of keyword-based queries on geo-textual data, the tutorial also explores topics such as continuous queries on streaming geo-textual data, queries that retrieve attractive regions of geo-textual objects, and queries that extract properties, e.g., topics and top-$k$ frequent words, of the objects in regions. The tutorial is designed to offer an overview of the problems addressed in this body of literature and offers an overview of pertinent concepts and techniques. In addition, the tutorial suggests open problems and new research direction.