Guest Editorial: Data Management and Analysis in Location-Based Social Networks

Excerpt

Social networks are prevalent on the Internet and become a hot research topic attracting many professionals from a variety of fields. The advances in location-acquisition and mobile communication technologies empower people to use location data with existing online social networks. The dimension of location helps bridge the gap between the physical world and online social networking services. Furthermore, people in an existing social network can expand their social structure with the new interdependency derived from their locations. This Special Issue focuses on the following important research questions in location based social networks. First, how to acquire quality location data which requires matching GPS locations obtained to map locations. Second, how to capture the correlations between the spatial and temporal aspects of the GPS trajectories. Third, how to mine and query the location data effectively and efficiently. Finally, how to deal with location privacy issues in all these tasks. This special issue is by no means a comprehensive coverage of the above questions, but we have selected five high-quality papers that address some of the challenges. They are summarized below: We would like to thank all the authors for their contribution to this Special Issue. …