A distributed architecture for management and retrieval of extended points of interest

This paper presents a distributed architecture for the management and retrieval of particular objects called POIsmarts. POIsmarts can be considered as the convergence between virtual points of interest (Web bookmarks) and physical points of interest (GPS bookmarks). We provide a XML schema defining the structure and properties of POIsmarts and we show how these objects can be stored, shared, searched and accessed in a uniform way independently from the user device. The paper also reports preliminary results on performing automatic categorization and search (in personal or shared POIsmart hierarchies) using machine learning techniques.