Extracting place semantics from geo-folksonomies

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. The main contributions of this research are as follows. 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. A method of clustering place resources to overcome the inaccuracy and redundancy inherent in the geo-folksonomy structure is developed and evaluated. Reference ontologies are created and used in a tag resolution stage to discover place-related concepts of interest. Folksonomy analysis techniques are then used to create a place ontology and its component type and activity ontologies. The resulting concept ontologies are compared with an expert ontology of place type and activities and evaluated through a user questionnaire. 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 abstract applications. Finally, the value of using the discovered place semantics is also demonstrated by proposing two semantic based similarity approaches; user similarity and place similarity. The validity of the approaches was confirmed by the results of an experiment conducted on a realistic folksonomy dataset

Enriching user profiles using geo-social place semantics in geo-folksonomies

Geo-folksonomies link social web users to geographic places through the tags users choose to label the places with. These tags can be a valuable source of information about the user’s perception of place and can reflect their experiences and activities in the places they label. By analysing the associations between users, places and tags, an understanding of a place and its relationships with other places can be drawn. This place characterisation is unique, dynamic and reflects the perception of a particular user community that generated the geo-folksonomy. In this work, an approach is proposed to analysing geo-folksonomies that builds on and extends existing statistical methods by considering specific concepts of relevance to geographic place resources, namely, place types and place-related activities, and by building a place ontology to encode those concepts and relationships. The folksonomy analysis and evaluation are demonstrated using a realistic geo-folksonomy data set. The resulting ontology is used to build user profiles from the folksonomy. The derived profiles reflect the association between users and the specific places they tag as well as other places with relevant associated place type and activities. The methods proposed here provide the potential for many interesting and useful applications, including the harvesting of useful insight on geographic space and employing the derived user profiles to enhance the search experience and to identify similarities between users based on their association to geographic places

Enhancing the quality of place resources in geo-folksonomies

Users’ interaction and collaboration on Web 2.0 via social bookmarking applications have resulted in creating a new structure of user-generated data, denoted folksonomies, where users, Web resources and tags generated by users are linked together. Some of those applications focus on geographic maps. They allow users to create and annotate geographic places and as such generate geo-folksonomies with geographically referenced resources. Geo-folksonomies suffer from redundancy problem, where users create and tag multiple place resources that reference the same geographic place on the ground. These multiple disjointed references result in fragmented tag collections and limited opportunities for effective analysis and integration of data sets. This paper, (1) defines the quality problem of resources in a geo-folksonomy (2) describes methods for identifying and merging redundant place resources and hence reducing the uncertainty in a geo-folksonomy, and (3) describes the evaluation of the methods proposed on a realistic sample data set. The evaluation results demonstrate the potential value of the approach