Composing Traveling Paths from Location-Based Services

Abstract

With the emergence of location-based services, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, users are allowed to easily perform check-in actions anywhere and anytime. The location-based check-in not only enables personal geospatial journeys but also serves as a kind of fine-grained source for trip planning. In this work, we aim to collectively compose traveling paths by leveraging the check-in data through mining the moving behaviors of users. A novel system, TP-Comp, is developed. To compose travel paths, TP-Comp not only allows users to specify starting/end and/or must-go locations, but also provides the flexibility of the time constraint requirement (i.e., the expected duration of the trip). By considering a sequence of check-in points as a traveling path, we mine the frequent sequences with some ranking mechanism to achieve the goal. Our TP-Comp targets at travelers who are unfamiliar to the objective area/city and have time limitation in the trip.