The workshop takes place at Fortezza da Basso, Palazzino Lorenese, Room 9.
9:00 – 10:30 Session 1
Opening (slides)
(Welcome Message)
Keynote: Chatty, Happy, and Smelly Maps.
Daniele Quercia.
(paper: pdf)
Mapping apps are the greatest game-changer for encouraging people to explore the city. You take your phone out and you know immediately where to go. However, the app also assumes there are only a handful of directions to the destination. It has the power to make those handful of directions the definitive direction to that destination.
A few years ago, my research started to focus on understanding how people psychologically experience the city. I used computer science tools to replicate social science experiments at scale, at web scale. I became captivated by the beauty and genius of traditional social science experiments done by Jane Jacobs, Stanley Milgram, Kevin Lynch. The result of that research has been the creation of new maps, maps where one does not only find the shortest path but also the most enjoyable path.
We did so by building a new city map weighted for human emotions. On this cartography, one is not only able to see and connect from point A to point B the shortest segments, but one is also able to see the happy path, the beautiful path, the quiet path. In tests, participants found the happy, the beautiful, the quiet paths far more enjoyable than the shortest one, and that just by adding a few minutes to travel time. Participants also recalled how some paths smelled and sounded. So what if we had a mapping tool that would return the most enjoyable routes based not only on aesthetics but also based on smell and sound? That is the research question this talk will start to address.
Reconnecting Digital Publications to the Web using their Spatial Information.
Ben De Meester, Tom De Nies, Ruben Verborgh, Erik Mannens and Rik Van de Walle.
(paper: pdf, slides)
Digital publications can be packaged, distributed, and viewed via the Open Web Platform using the EPUB 3 format. Meanwhile, the increased amount of mobile clients and the advent of HTML5’s Geolocation have opened a whole range of possibilities for digital publications to interact with their readers. However, EPUB 3 files often remain closed silos of information, no longer linked with the rest of the Web. In this paper, we propose a solution that addresses the difficulties of reconnecting digital publications with the Web using the spatial location of the concepts mentioned in the publication. We enrich digital publications by connecting the detected concepts to their URIs on, e.g., DBpedia, and use an algorithm that uses these URIs to retrieve or approximate the coordinates of these concepts. The evaluation of the approximation algorithm showed that almost any concept can be linked to a coordinate, but that the errors can be very high when context information is limited. This means relevant locations for a user can be shown, based on the content he or she is reading, and based on his or her location. This methodology can be used to reconnect digital publications with the online world, to entice readers, and ultimately, as a novel location-based recommendation technique.
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:30 Session 2
Verification of POI and Location Pairs via Weakly-Labeled Web Data.
Hsiu-Min Chuang and Chia-Hui Chang.
(paper: pdf, slides (pdf))
With the popularity of mobile devices and smart phones, location-based services (LBS) have become a common need in our daily life. Therefore, maintaining the correctness of POI (Points of Interest) data has become an important issue for many location-based services such as Google Maps and Garmin navigation system. The simplest form of POI contains a location (e.g. represented by an address) and an identifier (e.g. an organization name) that describes the location. As time goes by, the POI relationship of a location and organization pair may change due to grand-opening, moving and closing of business. Thus, effectively identifying the outdated or emerging POI relations is an important issue for improving the quality of POI data. In this paper, we examine the possibility of using location-related pages on the Web to verify existing POI relations via weakly labeled data, e.g. the co-occurrence of an organization and an address in pages, the published date of such pages, and the pairing diversity of an address or an organization, etc. The preliminary result shows a promising direction for discovering emerging POIs and requires more research for outdated POIs.
The Role of Geographic Information in News Consumption.
Gebrekirstos G. Gebremeskel and Arjen P. de Vries.
(paper: pdf, slides (pdf))
We investigate the role of geographic proximity in news consumption. Using a month-long log data of users’ interaction with news items of ten information portals, we study the relationship between users’ geographic locations and the geographic foci of information portals and local news categories. We find that the location of news consumers correlates with the geographical information of the information portals at two levels: the portal and the local news category. At the portal level, traditional mainstream news portals have a more geographically focused readership than special interest portals, such as sports and technology. At a finer level, the mainstream news portals have local news sections that have even more geographically focused readerships.
Discussion and Closing
Open issues, future directions, and general discussion.
Papers will have 20 minutes of presentation and 10 minutes discussion.
The LocWeb2015 papers will be published in the WWW Companion Proceedings and available from the ACM Digital Library.