From Georeferenced Data to Socio-Spatial Knowledge. Ontology Design Patterns to Discover Domain-Specific Knowledge from Crowdsourced Data

So far, ontologies developed to support Geographic Information science have been mostly designed from a space-centered rather than a human-centered and social perspective. In the last decades, a wealth of georeferenced data is collected through sensors, mobile and web platforms from the crowd, providing rich information about people’s collective experiences and behaviors in cities. As a consequence, these new data sources require models able to make machine-understandable the social meanings and uses people commonly associate with certain places. This contribution proposes a set of reusable Ontology Design Patterns (ODP) to guide a data mining workflow and to semantically enrich the mined results. The ODPs explicitly aim at representing two facets of the geographic knowledge - the built environment and people social behavior in cities - as well as the way they interact. Modelling the interplay between the physical and the human aspects of the urban environment provides an ontology representation of the socio-spatial knowledge which can be used as baseline domain knowledge for analysing and interpreting georeferenced data collected through crowdsourcing. An experimentation using a TripAdvisor data sample to recognize food consumption practices in the city of Turin is presented.