Publication

Abstract : Textual information is often added to spatial objects, and thus a spatial search query includes both location-based and textual-based information. For example, a user may want to visit a dental hospital with orthodontic appliances and dental lasers, before going to a pharmacy to buy some drugs (ibuprofen and tylenol). Currently, a brute force technique combined with a spatial inverted index is used to find an optimal set of spatial objects that satisfy both location and textual constraints. In this study, we identify some problems with the brute force technique and propose two algorithms that recommend an optimal shortest path among heterogeneous objects. Our method outputs the shortest path from the user point to all the heterogeneous objects. Results obtained using our algorithm demonstrated that it produces the optimal shortest path compared with existing spatial-textual search algorithms.