Topica

Abstract

We propose the use of Social Awareness Streams(e.g.Facebook) for characterising evolving features of Points of Interest (POIs), from the point of view of (human) end users. We present the Topica application which provides a view on the collective perception of POIs. The application is divided in two stages: (1) The Linked Data representation of POIs, and the (2) visualisation of POIs. The first stage mashes up services from OpenCalais, Zemanta and DBPedia Spotlight for entity enrichment; the second step mashes up services from Cloudmade and Google. Topica aims to model hidden characteristics of POIs. We demonstrate a novel application which: (1) Generates a Linked Data representation of the collective (user) perception of a POI; (2) Enhances the POI representation by mashing up services that enrich the POI-related entities; (3) Provides a visual representation of POIs using the Prism filtering framework.