Supporting rapid processing and interactive map-based exploration of streaming news

Abstract

The database architecture and system design of NewsStand, a database system that analyzes and displays streaming news using a map user interface, is described. Special emphasis is given to NewsStand's pipe server, which coordinates individual, independent analysis modules in a processing pipeline, and NewsStand's relational database schema, designed to accommodate responsive spatial querying and retrieval via NewsStand's user interface. Examples of these spatial queries, which are variants of top-k window queries, are also presented. Experiments on the live NewsStand database system demonstrate its capability for rapidly processing large amounts of streaming news as well as the interactivity of its map user interface as measured by database querying.