Exposing Points of Interest as Linked Geospatial Data Full text

Kostas Patroumpas, Dimitrios Skoutas, Georgios Mandilaras, Giorgos Giannopoulos, Spiros Athanasiou
Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD 2019)
2019
Conference/Workshop
Abstract. Point of Interest (POI) data is widely used in many modern applications and services related to navigation, tourism, social networking, logistics, and many more. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive and vendor-agnostic data model to represent multi-faceted and enriched POI profiles. Harnessing the versatility of Linked Data technologies, this semantically rich ontology accommodates and extends existing POI formats for assembling and managing POI data from heterogeneous sources. Furthermore, we have developed the open-source software TripleGeo, which can effectively transform POI data from diverse sources and formats (geographical files, databases, and semi-structured data) to their RDF representations and vice versa. Thus, it is possible to import POI data from various existing systems and products, transfer and address the data integration challenges in the Linked Data domain, and export back the results. Our empirical study confirms the validity and efficiency of this framework for a variety of real-world POI assets and formats, underscoring its robustness to cope with scalable data volumes.