A Framework and a Tool for Semantic Annotation of POIs in OpenStreetMap

Current mobile systems for assisted navigation have limited effectiveness in satisfying user needs. The information content supporting location-based service discovery and path calculation is usually limited. Semantic-based technologies can allow to overcome these limitations, by exploiting accurate and meaningful descriptions of locations, POIs, road segments and environmental conditions. We present here a general framework leveraging an enriched cartography, which may be useful not only to enhance travel satisfaction and safety, but also to regulate vehicle efficiency, traffic and environmental impact. The availability of semantically annotated map data is a crucial requirement for this kind of proposals to be practically viable. Unfortunately, the majority of available systems is developed upon closed and proprietary solutions for both maps and software applications, so third parties cannot extend their functionality. In order to overcome this restriction, the framework proposed here is based on open standards and tools: in particular, it leverages Semantic Web technologies and crowd-sourced maps available from OpenStreetMap (http://www.openstreetmap.org/), enriching nodes and POIs with semantic annotations to enable innovative Location Based Services (LBSs) for traveling users. Particularly, the paper proposes a general method for storing semantic annotations into OpenStreetMap road nodes and POIs, expressed w.r.t. ontologies in standard Semantic Web languages. A user-friendly software tool is also presented for editing semantic annotations through a fully visual user interface, based on simple drag-and-drop operations, implemented as a plugin for the popular open source JOSM Open-StreetMap editor (http://josm.openstreetmap.de/), that will make any OpenStreetMap contributor capable of enriching maps with semantic information. Finally, a semantic-enhanced navigation tool is proposed, capable of exploiting the enriched OpenStreetMap cartography. We present the framework, the tool, and an initial users’ evaluation.