Place Recognition and automatic semantic annotation via the Whereabouts diary

Purpose – Modern handheld devices provided with localization capabilities can create a diary of the user whereabouts, and provide a description of the user habits and a complement of the user profile in several applications. The places we go, in fact, reveal something about us; for example, two persons can be matched as compatible given the fact that they visit the same places. The purpose of this paper is to describe the Whereabouts diary in this context. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents the Whereabouts diary, an application/service to log the places visited by the user and to label them, in an automatic way, with descriptive semantic information. Web-retrieved information, and the temporal patterns with which different places are visited, can be used to automatically define meaningful semantic labels to the visited places. Findings – The paper verified that such diary application can be created and can effectively classify the places visited by the user. In particular, geocoding and white-pages web services were used to extract information about a place, and Bayesian networks to classify places on the basis of the time at which they have been visited. Research limitations/implications – The paper discusses this implementation, and presents experimental results. Experiments show that the identification of places and the accuracy of the place classification mechanism are effective, while the accuracy of geocoding and white-pages retrieval should be improved. Originality/value – This paper shows the novel Whereabouts diary application. Several mechanisms presented are original to this approach. In addition, several applications that can exploit the diary are illustrated.