I. Viktoratos, A. Tsadiras, N. Bassiliades, “A Context-Aware Web-Mapping System for Group-Targeted Offers Using Semantic Technologies”, Expert Systems with Applications, Elsevier, Vol. 42, No. 9, pp. 4443-4459, 2015.
Existing location based systems that propose offers to their users do not provide points of interest (POIs) owners with the capability to flexibly customize their target groups of people / customers based on their context but they simply rely on the pre-determined application’s methods to approach them. These systems also suffer from information overload, often providing offers to a user that are neither valid nor interesting because they do not match his/her context. Moreover, these offering strategies are not interoperable among different systems. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an innovative web-mapping context-aware system called “SPLIS” (Semantic Personalized Location Information System) that utilizes Semantic Web technologies for delivering group-targeted offers from POI owners to users/potential customers. The presented system a) adopts the schema.org ontology, b) uses RuleML-compatible rules to represent group-targeted POI offers, c) combines at run-time the above to match user context with suitable offers, and finally, d) visualizes offers in an intuitive way. The paper also reports on a user evaluation of the system.