KORS: Keyword-aware Optimal Route Search System

We present the Keyword-aware Optimal Route Search System (KORS), which efficiently answers the KOR queries. A KOR query is to find a route such that it covers a set of user-specified keywords, a specified budget constraint is satisfied, and an objective score of the route is optimized. Consider a tourist who wants to spend a day exploring a city. The user may issue the following KOR query: “find the most popular route such that it passes by shopping mall, restaurant, and pub, and the travel time to and from her hotel is within 4 hours.” KORS provides browser-based interfaces for desktop and laptop computers and provides a client application for mobile devices as well. The interfaces and the client enable users to formulate queries and view the query results on a map. Queries are then sent to the server for processing by the HTTP post operation. Since answering a KOR query is NP-hard, we devise two approximation algorithms with provable performance bounds and one greedy algorithm to process the KOR queries in our KORS prototype. We use two real-world datasets to demonstrate the functionality and performance of this system.