Travel History: Reconstructing Travelers Semantic Trajectories based on Heterogeneous Social Footprints

Abstract

Travel specialized websites have increased their sociability and usage byadopting mechanisms that facilitates content sharing in real time between users. Theseweb applications, however, lack tools that allow travelers to share their experiences, suchas places they have visited, itineraries they have performed, and other activities of atypical touristic trip. These kinds of information, when available, are insufficient andincomplete. The process of generating structured and semantic rich datasets based onrecommended trips, routes and destinations usually requires high effort to be generated.This task is frequently manual, cumbersome, inaccurate, time-consuming, and dependson user s willingness to cooperate. This work proposes a solution for reconstructingtravel histories using heterogeneous social sources, such as posts in social networks, GPSpositioning data, location history data generated by cloud services or any digitalfootprint with an associated geographic position. The solution encompasses a conceptualmodel; a methodology to reconstruct travel histories based on heterogeneous socialtracks sources; and an application to present the reconstructed travel itinerary in agraphical and interactive fashion. An experiment conducted with real travelers showedthat the proposed solution is a reasonable way to reconstruct semantic-rich travelhistories in an automatic fashion