OpenPOI: An Open Place of Interest Platform (Short Paper)

Places of Interest (POI) are a principal component of how human behavior is captured in today's geographic information. Increasingly, access to POI datasets are being restricted - even silo-ed - for commercial use, with vendors often impeding access to the very users that contribute the data. Open mapping platforms such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) offer access to a plethora of geospatial data though they can be limited in the attribute resolution or range of information associated with the data. Nuanced descriptive information associated with POI, e.g., ambience, are not captured by such platforms. Furthermore, interactions with a POI, such as checking in, or recommending a menu item, are inherently place-based concepts. Many of these interactions occur with high temporal volatility that involves frequent interaction with a platform, arguably inappropriate for the "changeset" model adopted by OSM and related datasets. In this short paper we propose OpenPOI, an open platform for storing, serving, and interacting with places of interests and the activities they afford.