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

Abstract

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