Improving the Quality of GPS-based Personal Gazetteers

The increasing prevalence of location-aware mobile devices such as car-navigation systems, phones and cameras provides a wealth of location information about a person, which can be used to build up a personal gazetteer for the device owner. The main technology employed for determining device location is GPS and classically the loss of the GPS signal at the device is interpreted as identifying places to include in the personal gazetteer. However, in densely built-up areas GPS data is often very dirty, with frequent loss of signal due to an insufficient number of satellites visible, and which do not indicate an actual place. In this paper heuristics for improving the quality of GPS log data are investigated and their impact on the personal gazetteer derived from the GPS data is evaluated.