Secure Top-K Query Processing Via Untrusted Location-Based Service Providers

This paper considers a novel distributed system for collaborative location-based information generation and sharing which become increasingly popular due to the explosive growth of Internet-capable and location-aware mobile devices. The system consists of a data collector, data contributors, Location-Based Service Providers (LBSPs), and system users. The data collector gathers reviews about Points-Of-Interest (POIs) from data contributors, while LBSPs purchase POI data sets from the data collector and allow users to perform location-based top-k queries which ask for the POIs in a certain region and with the highest k ratings for an interested POI attribute.