The Retrieval of Social Network Data for Points-of-Interest in OpenStreetMap

Abstract

OpenStreetMap is a volunteered geographic information system aimed at creating a free editable map of the world. One of the central elements of OpenStreetMap is the point-of-interest (POI). OpenStreetMap’s contributors label POIs with information about them, including their name, type, address, etc. However, to use OpenStreetMap for touristic purposes, POIs should be annotated with useful information for visitors. Recently, our group developed XOSM, a query language and visualization tool for OpenStreetMap. This paper describes how to integrate social network queries into the XOSM query language. As a consequence of such integration, XOSM enables the definition and visualization of queries in which social network data are retrieved for POIs. XOSM social network queries serve to analyze the characteristics and relevance of POIs by visualizing Twitter and YouTube data. XOSM APIs have been built on top of the social network APIs to map XOSM POIs to social network data. To obtain better accuracy and reduce noise in the matching of OpenStreetMap POIs and social network data, some improvements are proposed. In particular, this paper suggests restricting the search space of the APIs by using the city name and the type of POI and then filtering the results of the APIs using the Levenshtein distance, examines the advantages of such improvements, and provides benchmarks that validate the proposal.