Semantically Enriched POI as Ontological Foundation for Web- Based and Mobile Spatial Applications

While developing a web-based travel planning system, the necessity to implement a mobile component has been identified. Such a conception is aimed at a comprehensive support of a workflow that enables users to plan a trip in advance using the web-based application, but to modify the original plan wherever and whenever they want while carrying out the journey. Within both components, POI (Point-of-Interest) plays a significant role to determine a tour. It is one claim of this chapter that the relevance of POI is dependent from the perspective of a user. As a consequence, the originally used POI database was replaced by a POI ontology which promised to support the workflow more comprehensively. This conceptual change raised several questions concerning the domain dependence of the POI ontology on the one side, and universal aspects of the ontology on the other.