Enhancing Location-Based Social Media Network Services with Semantic Technologies: A Review

Abstract

Today’s location-based social media services have gone beyond mere sharing users’real-time locationsvia internet, they now serve as the bridge between the real world and the online world. Location-based social media application can now recommend point of interest to users based on geographical information and user’s profile gatheredon social media networks. Semantic web technology provides tools,platforms and techniques to extract meaning, processand integrate structure datafrom the social web and other sources.The rapid increasein number of social media networks and theenormous amount of geographical and social data flow across mobile and web platforms, have not only provided rich data source for web applications but also help developers to facilitate location-based social media services. However, unprecedented amount of noise and unstructured data exist on these networks, making knowledge representation, point of interest recommendation and precision of search engine results cumbersome processes.In this paper, we presentreview of various semantic technologies that could bedeployed to enhance location-based social media services with emphasis on architectures, tools, supporting technologies and the pros and cons of each of these technologies.