Model and Data Engineering

The web is being accessed increasingly by users for which an accurate geo-location is available, and increasing volumes of geo-tagged content are available on the web, including web pages, points of interest, and microblog posts. Studies suggest that each week, several billions of keyword-based queries are issued that have some form of local intent and that target geo-tagged web content with textual descriptions. This state of affairs gives prominence to spatial web data management, and it opens to a research area full of new and exciting opportunities and challenges. A prototypical spatial web query takes a user location and user-supplied keywords as arguments, and it returns content that is spatially and textually relevant to these arguments. Due perhaps to the rich semantics of geographical space and its importance to our daily lives, many different kinds of relevant spatial web query functionality may be envisioned. Based on recent and ongoing work by the speaker and his colleagues, the talk presents key functionality, concepts, and techniques relating to spatial web querying; it presents functionality that addresses different kinds of user intent; and it outlines directions for the future development of keyword-based spatial web querying. Bio. Christian S. Jensen is Obel Professor of Computer Science at Aalborg University, Denmark, and he was previously with Aarhus University for three years and spent a one-year sabbatical at Google Inc., Mountain View. His research concerns data management and data-intensive systems, and its focus is on temporal and spatio-temporal data management. Christian is an ACM and an IEEE Fellow, and he is a member of Academia Europaea, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences. He has received several national and international awards for his research. He is Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Database Systems. Using Conceptual Model Technologies for Understanding the Human Genome: From an “Homo Sapiens” to an “Homo Genius”