Verification of POI and location pairs via weakly labeled web data

With the increased popularity of mobile devices and smart phones, location-based services (LBS) have become a common need in our daily life. Therefore, maintaining the correctness of POI (Points of Interest) data has become an important issue for many location-based services such as Google Maps and Garmin navigation systems. The simplest form of POI contains a location (e.g., represented by an address) and an identifier (e.g., an organization name) that describes the location. As time goes by, the POI relationship of a location and organization pair may change due to the opening, moving, or closing of a business. Thus, effectively identifying outdated or emerging POI relations is an important issue for improving the quality of POI data. In this paper, we examine the possibility of using location-related pages on the Web to verify existing POI relations via weakly labeled data, e.g., the co-occurrence of an organization and an address in Web pages, the published date of such pages, and the pairing diversity of an address or an organization, etc. The preliminary result shows a promising direction for discovering emerging POI and mandates more research for outdated POI.