A Spatial Mashup Framework for Processing Location-based Queries

Spatial mashups are server-side Web-based applications that retrieve the real-time turn-by-turn directions and travel times between two location points from a Web mapping service provider, e.g., Google Maps and Microsoft Bing Maps. This project will develop a spatial mashup framework for processing location-based queries in a time-dependent road network environment where the distance metric is based on dynamic travel time. Unfortunately, spatial mashups have several major limitations, e.g., processing an external Web mapping request is much more expensive than accessing local data sources and existing Web mapping services only support simple spatial operations. To support more valuable location-based services, the proposed framework will support various popular types of location-based queries, e.g., nearest-neighbor (NN) queries, reverse-NN queries, and aggregate NN queries, and moving data objects. In addition, we will design information sharing and parallel processing techniques to minimize the number of external Web mapping requests and query processing time.