Location-aware spatial keyword search App using Google maps API

Abstract

Route planning problem is a very popular problem found in map applications. With the development of mobile phone technologies and fast growing travelling industry, a fast, reliable and sound route planning application is in great need.

There are some applications that provide route planning services, such as Qiongyou.com, Google Maps and Google Earth. Those applications to some degree satisfy users’ requirement and thus are very popular nowadays. However, those applications plan route either based on historical routes (predefined routes) or exact locations. The users are expecting to have an application that is able to process more flexible search queries like searching routes by keywords.

There are quite a few algorithms that are able to solve this problem. This project would look into those algorithms and analyze the efficiency, quality, advantages and disadvantages of those algorithms.

In this project, the author would also build a prototype web application using those algorithms. The author would explain how the application was designed and how the key algorithms were implemented. The author would also introduce the key techniques that were required to implement this application such as Google Maps API, Json, jQuery, etc.

This report would conclude with results generated by test data. A brief discussion would be conducted on the results. Meanwhile, recommendations for future work would also be suggested in the conclusion part.