Personalized Community Maps

Liliana Ardissono, Maurizio Lucenteforte, Noemi Mauro, Adriano Savoca
Dipartimento di Informatica
Università di Torino
Torino, Italy
{liliana.ardissono,maurizio.lucenteforte,noemi.mauro}@unito.it
adriano.savoca@di.unito.it

Angioletta Voghera
Politecnico di Torino
Inter-University Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning
Torino, 10125 Italy
angioletta.voghera@polito.it


ABSTRACT

With the convergence of GIS and Internet technology, the Public Administration 
is starting to use online maps as a web-based bidirectional communication channel 
with the population: maps are used (i) in public portals, 
for publishing and crowdsourcing information about the territory; 
(ii) in policy-making, for defining a community vision of the territory 
and for involving people in public choices. Both cases raise challenges 
related to the large amount of data handled in the maps, and to their 
lack of group collaboration support.
We attempted to address these issues by developing an information-sharing model, 
and a testbed software application, that support group management and 
the generation of persistent, custom community maps focused on the user’s interests. 
Our model builds on tag-based user profiles and on information filtering. 
This article describes our model and the results of an evaluation of the 
GroupMapping application, based on it.

Keywords: Community maps; participatory GIS; personalization; 
information filtering; crowdsourcing.