Spatial Consensus Queries in a Collaborative Environment

Abstract

We introduce a new type of query for a location-based social network platform. Consider a scenario in which a group of users is trying to find a common meeting location, yet attempting to include all group members is introducing a significant traveling cost to most of them. In this article, we formulate a new query type called the consensus query, which can be used to help users explore these trade-off options to find a solution upon which everyone can agree. Specifically, we study the problem of evaluating consensus queries in the context of nearest neighbor queries, where the group is interested in finding a meeting place that minimizes the travel distance for at least a specified number o..