Intelligent and Personalized Community Maps

My PhD project focuses on Participatory GIS (PGIS). In the project I analyze two methodologies to offer personalized search results in community maps and a natural interaction with the system. The first consists of automatically gathering the terms according to which the users express their information needs, in order to enrich the domain conceptualization of a PGIS, giving common definitions for places. The second concerns the creation of ontology-based user models that reflect the interests, lexicon and modality of expression adopted by each person, mapped to the domain ontology adopted by the PGIS. In the project I also analyze how these techniques may be jointly used during the query expansion process to retrieve more accurate and relevant search results.