Capturing Place Semantics on the GeoSocial Web
Massive interest in geo referencing of personal resources is evident on the web. People are collaboratively digitising maps and building place knowledge resources that document personal use and experiences in geographic places. Understanding and discovering these place semantics can potentially lead to the development of a different type of place gazetteer that holds not only standard information of place names and geographic location but also activities practiced by people in a place and vernacular views of place characteristics. In this paper, a novel framework is proposed for the analysis of geo folksonomies and the automatic discovery of place related semantics. The framework is based on a model of geographic place that extends the definition of place as defined in traditional gazetteers and geospatial ontologies to include the notion of place affordance. The derived place related concepts are compared against an expert formal ontology of place types and activities and evaluated using both a user based evaluation experiment and by measuring the degree of semantic relatedness of the derived concepts. To demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework, an application is developed to illustrate the possible enrichment of search experience by exposing the derived semantics to users of web mapping applications.
Journal on Data Semantics