TsingNUS: A location-based service system towards Live City

Abstract

We present our system towards live city, called TsingNUS, aiming to provide users with more user-friendly location-aware search experiences. TsingNUS crawls location-based user-generated content from the Web (e.g., Foursquare and Twitter), cleans and integrates them to provide users with rich well-structured data. TsingNUS provides three user-friendly search paradigms: location-aware instant search, location-aware similarity search and direction-aware search. Instant search returns relevant answers instantly as users type in queries letter by letter, which can help users to save typing efforts significantly. Location-aware similarity search enables fuzzy matching between queries and the underlying data, which can tolerate typing errors. The two features boost the search performance and improve the experiences for mobile users who often misspell the keywords due to the limitation of the mobile phone's keyboard. In addition, users have direction-aware search requirements in many applications. For example, a driver on the highway wants to find the nearest gas station or restaurant. She has a search requirement that the answers should be in front of her driving direction. TsingNUS enables direction-aware search to address this problem and allows users to search in specific directions. Moreover, TsingNUS incorporates continuous search to efficiently support continuously moving queries in a client-server system which can reduce the number of queries submitted to the server and Communication cost between the client and server. We have implemented and deployed a system which has been Commonly used and widely accepted. Copyright © 2013 ACM.