Collaborative semantic points of interests

Abstract

The novel mobile application csxPOI (short for: collaborative, semantic, and context-aware points-of-interest) enables its users to collaboratively create, share, and modify semantic points of interest (POI). Semantic POIs describe geographic places with explicit semantic properties of a collaboratively created ontology. As the ontology includes multiple subclassifications and instantiations and as it links to DBpedia, the richness of annotation goes far beyond mere textual annotations such as tags. Users can search for POIs through the subclass hierarchy of the collaboratively created ontology. For example, a POI annotated as bakery can be found through the search string shop as it is a superclass of bakery. Data mining techniques are employed to cluster and thus improve the quality of the collaboratively created POIs. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.