Toward traffic-driven location-based web search Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • The emergence of location sharing services is rapidly accelerating the convergence of our online and offline activities. In one direction, Foursquare, Google Latitude, Facebook Places, and related services are enriching real-world venues with the social and semantic connections among online users. In analogy to how clickstreams have been successfully incorporated into traditional web ranking based on content and link analysis, we propose to mine traffic patterns revealed through location sharing services to augment traditional location-based search. Concretely, we study location-based traffic patterns revealed through location sharing services and find that these traffic patterns can identify semantically related locations. Based on this observation, we propose and evaluate a traffic-driven location clustering algorithm that can group semantically related locations with high confidence. Through experimental study of 12 million locations from Foursquare, we extend this result through supervised location categorization, wherein traffic patterns can be used to accurately predict the semantic category of uncategorized locations. Based on these results, we show how traffic-driven semantic organization of locations may be naturally incorporated into location-based web search. 2011 ACM.

name of conference

  • Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management

published proceedings

  • Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management

author list (cited authors)

  • Cheng, Z., Caverlee, J., Kamath, K. Y., & Lee, K.

citation count

  • 21

complete list of authors

  • Cheng, Zhiyuan||Caverlee, James||Kamath, Krishna Yeswanth||Lee, Kyumin

editor list (cited editors)

  • Macdonald, C., Ounis, I., & Ruthven, I.

publication date

  • January 2011