On the practicalities of place-based virtual communities: Ontology-based querying, application architecture, and performance

While the Internet has allowed geographical boundaries to be transcended, with the increasing use of the mobile Internet, there is a shift towards a focus on locality and place-specific applications. This paper proposes a novel approach for constructing context-aware mobile services for a place using a commonly shared knowledge base, that captures not only static but dynamic aspects of a place. The approach is based on a conceptual model of a Place-Based Virtual Community (PBVC), represented using an ontology; a PBVC for a place augments the place with context-aware services based on querying an ontology. We present an implementation of a framework based on the ontology and an evaluation of the performance of queries over the ontology. We also illustrate architectures of specific applications as specialisation of a generic PlaceComm architecture.