Deciphering Location Context - A Semantic Web Approach

Abstract

Mobile user location data has been commercially exploited and studied due to the commoditization of GPS position sensors and the popularity of Location Based Ser- vices (LBS). Context researchers have already studied how to understand human mo- bility using location histories, and how to model location context using ontologies. However, these studies make surprisingly little use of rich geospatial data and knowledge about the world to a) explicitly describe user locations, and b) possibly infer implicit contexts. In this paper, we demonstrate that openly accessible geospatial data can facilitate both a) and b), thus resulting in improved understanding of mobile user location context.