Semantic Trajectories: Mobility Data Computation and Annotation

With the large-scale adoption of GPS equipped mobile sensing devices, positional data generated by moving objects (e.g., vehicles, people, animals) are being easily collected. Such data are typically modeled as streams of spatio-temporal (x,y,t) points, called ''trajectories''. In recent years trajectory management research has progressed significantly towards efficient storage and indexing techniques, as well as suitable knowledge discovery. These works focused on the geometric aspect of the raw mobility data. We are now witnessing a growing demand in several application sectors (e.g., from shipment tracking to geo-social networks) on understanding the {\it semantic'' behavior of moving objects. Semantic behavior refers to the use of semantic abstractions of the raw mobility data, including not only geometric patterns but also knowledge extracted jointly from the mobility data and the underlying geographic and application domains information. The core contribution of this paper lies in a ''Semantic Model'' and a ''Computation and Annotation Platform'' for developing a semantic approach that progressively transforms the raw mobility data into semantic trajectories enriched with annotations and segmentations. We also analyze a number of experiments we did with semantic trajectories in different domains.