The NSF-sponsored Platys project explored the idea that places are more than just GPS coordinates. They are concepts rich with semantic information, including people, activities, roles, functions, time and purpose. Our mobile phones can learn to recognize the places we are in and use information about them to provide better services.

Laura Zavala, Pradeep K. Murukannaiah, Nithyananthan Poosamani, Tim Finin, Anupam Joshi, Injong Rhee and Munindar P. Singh, Platys: From Position to Place-Oriented Mobile Computing, AI Magazine, v36, n2, 2015.

The Platys project focuses on developing a high-level, semantic notion of location called place. A place, unlike a geospatial position, derives its meaning from a user’s actions and interactions in addition to the physical location where it occurs. Our aim is to enable the construction of a large variety of applications that take advantage of place to render relevant content and functionality and, thus, improve user experience. We consider elements of context that are particularly related to mobile computing. The main problems we have addressed to realize our place-oriented mobile computing vision are representing places, recognizing places, and engineering place-aware applications. We describe the approaches we have developed for addressing these problems and related subproblems. A key element of our work is the use of collaborative information sharing where users’ devices share and integrate knowledge about places. Our place ontology facilitates such collaboration. Declarative privacy policies allow users to specify contextual features under which they prefer to share or not share their information.