Linking Open Data and the Crowd for Real-Time Passenger Information

Abstract

The availability of real-time passenger information (RTPI) is a key factor in making public transport both accessible and attractive to users. Unfortunately, rural areas often lack the infrastructure necessary to provide such information, and the cost of deploying and maintaining the required technologies outside of urban areas is seen as prohibitive. In this paper we present the GetThere system developed to overcome such issues and to provide public transport users in rural areas with RTPI. An ontological framework for representing mobility information is described, along with the Linked Data approach used to integrate heterogeneous data from multiple sources including government, transport operators, and the public. To mitigate possible issues with the veracity of this data, a quality assessment framework was developed that utilises data provenance. We also discuss our experiences working with Semantic Web technologies in this domain, and present results from both a user trial and a performance evaluation of the system.

Resolving data sparsity and cold start problem in collaborative filtering recommender system using Linked Open Data

“…However, rural areas lack infrastructure, so it is difficult to provide information. With the help of open linked data, it is feasible to provide such services to users (Corsar et al, 2017). The DESIRE recommender system is designed to improve the performance of movie recommendations by keeping both the accuracy and diversity at an optimal level (Srinivasan & Mani, 2018).…”

Linked Open Data in Location-Based Recommendation System on Tourism Domain: A Survey

“…The system recommended tourist destinations by using user preferences of the categories of tourism and contextual information, such as user locations, the weather of tourist destinations, and destination's closing time. Corsar et al [73] presented the GetThere system that is a semantic mobility travel information system to provide real-time passenger information. An ontology framework was developed to support the system, along with the Linked Data method used to integrate heterogeneous information from multiple sources including government, transport operators, and the public.…”

Mapping heterogeneous research infrastructure metadata into a unified catalogue for use in a generic virtual research environment

“…Nevertheless, the use of linked data [31] for describing resources (of all kinds) is well-established, with research now focusing on different approaches for generating linked data from various sources both static and dynamic, as well as with how to navigate and query distributed information once made available. Recent examples of such research include the generation of a navigable Graph of Things from live Internet of Things data sources [50] and the use of crowdsourcing to provide real-time transport data in rural areas [51], both topics with parallels to how RIs gather and expose field observations acquired via sensors or human experts. On the topic of distributed query, various languages/frameworks have been proposed such as LDQL [52] and LILAC [53], which can make linked data based search over distributed catalogues more practical than is currently the case by better distributing queries across catalogue nodes with less redundancy and then joining the results efficiently.…”