Catalin-Mihai Barbu

3cixty: Building Comprehensive Knowledge Bases For City Exploration

Abstract Planning a visit to Expo Milano 2015 or simply touring in Milan are activities that require a certain amount of a priori knowledge of the city. In this paper, we present the process of building such comprehensive knowledge bases that contain descriptions of events and activities, places and sights, transportation facilities as well as social activities, collected from numerous static, near- and real-time local and global data providers, including hyper local sources such as the Expo Milano 2015 official services and several social media platforms. Entities in the 3cixty KB are deduplicated, interlinked and enriched using semantic technologies. The 3cixty KB is empowering the ExplorMI 360 multi-device application, which has been officially endorsed by the E015 Technical Management Board and has gained the patronage of Expo Milano in 2015, thus has offered a unique testing scenario for the 20 million visitors along the 6 months of the exhibit. In 2016–2017, new knowledge bases have been created for the cities of London, Madeira and Singapore, as well as for the entire French Cote d’Azur area. The 3cixty KB is accessible at https://kb.3cixty.com/sparql while ExplorMI 360 at https://www.3cixty.com and in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

Increasing the Trustworthiness of Recommendations by Exploiting Social Media Sources

Current recommender systems mostly do not take into account as well as they might the wealth of information available in social media, thus preventing the user from obtaining a broad and reliable overview of different opinions and ratings on a product. Furthermore, there is a lack of user control over the recommendation process-which is mostly fully automated and does not allow the user to influence the sources and mechanisms by which recommendations are produced-as well as over the presentation of recommended items. Consequently, recommendations are often not transparent to the user, are considered to be less trustworthy, or do not meet the users situational needs. This work will investigate the theoretical foundations for user-controllable, interactive methods of recommending, will develop techniques that exploit social media data in conjunction with other sources, and will validate the research empirically in the area of e-commerce product recommendations. The methods developed are intended to be applicable in a wide range of recommending and decision support scenarios.

3cixty: An innovative way to explore cities

3cixty is a flexible and modular platform that integrates heterogeneous data in a semantic knowledge base and provides a full API ecosystem that affords the rapid development of web and mobile apps. It allows answering complex queries that combine different types of information about events, places, and means of transportation in a city. We describe ExplorMI 360, the first large-scale solution based on 3cixty, which has been developed to support visitors to Milan and Expo 2015. By leveraging services already deployed in smart cities, the application aims to support tourists arriving in a new city in planning their visit, exploring their surroundings, and moving around efficiently.