  We present a new class of service for location based social networks, called
the Flexible Group Spatial Keyword Query, which enables a group of users to
collectively find a point of interest (POI) that optimizes an aggregate cost
function combining both spatial distances and keyword similarities. In
addition, our query service allows users to consider the tradeoffs between
obtaining a sub-optimal solution for the entire group and obtaining an
optimimized solution but only for a subgroup.
  We propose algorithms to process three variants of the query: (i) the group
nearest neighbor with keywords query, which finds a POI that optimizes the
aggregate cost function for the whole group of size n, (ii) the subgroup
nearest neighbor with keywords query, which finds the optimal subgroup and a
POI that optimizes the aggregate cost function for a given subgroup size m (m
<= n), and (iii) the multiple subgroup nearest neighbor with keywords query,
which finds optimal subgroups and corresponding POIs for each of the subgroup
sizes in the range [m, n]. We design query processing algorithms based on
branch-and-bound and best-first paradigms. Finally, we provide theoretical
bounds and conduct extensive experiments with two real datasets which verify
the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms.
