Discovering Areas of Interest Using a Semantic Geo-Clustering Approach

Living in the era of social networking, coupled together with great advances in digital multimedia user-generated content, motivated us to focus our research work on humanistic data generated by such activities towards new, more efficient ways of extracting semantically meaningful information in the process. More specifically, the herein proposed approach aims to extract areas of interest in urban areas, utilizing the increasing socially-generated knowledge from social networks. A part of the area of interest is selected, then split into "tiles" and processed with an iterative merging approach whose goal is to extract larger, "homogeneous" areas which are of special (e.g., tourist) interest. In this work generated areas of interest focus on interesting points from the humanistic point of view, thus covering in general main touristic attractions and places of interest. In order to achieve our goals, we exploit two types of metadata, namely location-based information (geo-tags) geo-tags and simple user-generated tags.