Introduction

With the significant market size of real-estate market across the world, the demand for property has reached a new level. At the same time, searching for properties through the internet has become a convenient approach for users. There are several existing property searching applications, such as Airbnb and ziroom, which help users to find their desired property locations.

After investigating on these property searching applications, observations shows that these applications only supports simple searching functionalities, by searching for single elements and applying simple filters. However, in real life scenarios, users might have more complex requirements on their desired property, for example, the user might want a school as well as a hospital not too close nor too far from his property. As a result, a more advanced searching utility is in demand.

Recently, a new type of spatial group keyword query is raised in researches, which is called spatial pattern matching (SPM). Spatial pattern is a graph with its vertices being keywords and its edges being distance constraints between any pair of keywords. This type of query matches a group of objects with their keywords and distance constraints satisfying the spatial pattern specified by the user. Its solutions have been raised and well-discussed.

With the help of SPM and its solutions, we can achieve the advanced searching functionality mentioned above. As a result, our outlook is to realize this kind of advanced searching utility in these housing applications as a module. In this project, our goal is to demonstrate the feasibility and importance of this searching utility by developing a standalone web-based application.