Discovering Places of Interest through Direct and Indirect Associations in Heterogeneous Sources -- The TravelSampo System
Eetu Mäkelä, Aleksi Lindblad, Jari Väätäinen, Rami Alatalo, Osma Suominen, Eero Hyvönen · 2011
Linked data related to places offers a superior collection of information to base search and recommendation functionality on in eTourism visit planning as well as location-aware mobile applications. Besides places interesting in themselves, through linked data it is possible to discover places interesting only through association, such as being the venue for a concert by an artist with an interesting genre. However, in order to harness this collective data source, challenges relating to data heterogeneity, quality, scale, and indexing and querying complexity must be resolved. In this paper, the TravelSampo visit planning and mobile application is presented, which tackles these issues. Using the system, queries describing both simple and complex interests can be run over some 17 million places of interest from over 20 vastly heterogeneous sources.