Automated feeding of POI base for the generation of route descriptions

Mashups is a new way to develop Web applications by combining preexistent Web services, features and content in order to provide new features and services. Location systems are maybe the most popular mashups. An example of a location system is RotaCerta. This system makes use of Google Maps API to generate textual route descriptions between two locations within a city. RotaCerta novelty is the use of Points of Interest (POI) in the generated descriptions so to facilitate the route comprehension and assimilation by the user. RotaCerta suffers, however, from a severe limitation on the need for manual feeding of the POI´s base for each city of interest. This work is exhausting, costly, and greatly limits its usage. This paper proposes a mechanism for automated feeding of POI base for RotaCerta system by means of Google Places. Experiments were performed for three different cities in Brazil and the results confirm the gain of intuitiveness in the textual description of the generated paths and demonstrated the elimination of previous limitation and the consequent encouragement of its large scale usage.