An experiment in discovering personally meaningful places from location data

As mobile devices become location-aware, they offer the promise of powerful new applications. While computers work with physical locations like latitude and longitude, people think and speak in terms of places, like "my office" or "Sue's house". Therefore, location-aware applications must incorporate the notion of places to achieve their full potential. This requires systems to acquire the places that are meaningful for each user. Previous work has explored algorithms to discover personal places from location data. However, we know of no empirical, quantitative evaluations of these algorithms, so the question of how well they work currently is unanswered. We report here on an experiment that begins to provide an answer; we show that a place discovery algorithm can do a good job of discovering places that are meaningful to users. The results have important implications for system design and open up interesting avenues for future research.