Answering Location-Aware Graph Reachability Queries on GeoSocial Data

Thanks to the wide spread use of mobile and wearable devices, popular social networks, e.g., Facebook, prompts users to add spatial attributes to social entities, e.g., check-ins, traveling posts, and geotagged photos, leading to what is known as, The GeoSocial Graph. In such graph, usersmay issue a Reachability Query with Spatial Range Predicate (abbr. RangeReach). RangeReach finds whether an input vertex can reach any spatial vertex that lies within an input spatial range. The paper proposes GEOREACH, an approach that adds spatial data awareness to a graph database management system. GEOREACH allows efficient execution of RangeReach queries, yet without compromising a lot on the overall system scalability. Experiments based on system implementation inside Neo4j prove that GEOREACH exhibits up to two orders of magnitude better query performance and up to four times less storage than the state-of-the-art spatial and reachability indexing approaches.