On the enrichment of a RDF repository of city points of interest based on social data

Points of interest (POIs) in a city are specific locations that present some significance to people; examples include restaurants, museums, hotels, theatres and landmarks, just to name a few. Due to their role in our social and economic life, POIs have been increasingly gaining the attention of location-based applications, such as online maps and social networking sites. While it is relatively easy to find on the Web basic information about a POI, such as its geographic location, telephone number and opening hours, it is more challenging to have a deeper knowledge as to what other people say about it. What if a person wants to know all the restaurants in Paris that serve good seafood and provide a kind service? Typically, the answer to this question has to be looked for on websites that let people leave comments and opinions on POIs, a time-consuming manual task that few are willing to do. This search would be better supported by search engines if information mined from opinions were available in a structured form, such as RDF. In this position paper, we describe a general approach to enrich an existing RDF repository about POIs with data obtained from social networking sites.