Evaluating Skyline Queries on Spatial Web Objects

GoogleMaps, Google Earth and Bing Maps have stimulated the visual exploration of maps on the Web and have allowed users to query spatial web objects. A spatial web object has a geographical location and usually has associated a textual description or a link to a web document. To select the objects in response to a query the data contained in their textual description or document must be inspected. Skyline is a query processing paradigm which offers queries over multiple criteria, where each criterion is equally important. In this paper we define Location-based Textual Skyline queries as those which use a spatial function and a function over descriptive text as criteria in a Skyline query. For example, a Location-based Textual Skyline query may use the distance and the relevance of keywords in the text describing a spatial web object, as criteria to retrieve objects. We define a technique to evaluate this kind of query and develop an experimental study to evaluate the proposed technique.