The experience of realizing a semantic web urban computing application

Abstract

Urban Computing is a branch of Pervasive Computing that investigates urban settings and everyday lifestyles. A large quantity of information to develop pervasive applications for urban environments is often already available, even if scattered and not integrated: maps, points of interest, user locations, traffic, pollution, and events are just a few examples of the digitalized information which we can access on the Web. Applications for mobile users that leverage such information are rapidly growing. In this article, we report our experience in addressing practical computational issues influencing the use of Geographic Information Systems and geospatial data from the standpoint of semantics and pervasive computing. We refer to the early achievements of the LarKC project, in which we developed an Urban Computing demonstrator. We highlight the positive sides of our experience and we discuss open issues and possible advances. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.