9. Conclusion and future work
In this work we have taken a fresh look at the concept of loca- tion. We have proposed a general framework for extracting, char- acterizing, and classifying the Points of Interest of each individual according to their relevance for her/him. We have also proposed suitable metrics and algorithms to describe the semantic values of locations and the commuting rules among them. Our key observations are as follows: • individuals are regularly drawn to a limited set of locations where they spend most of their time; • they also spend a significant amount of time in locations they 996 only visit once; • people commute between places based on temporal distance – not spatial distance – factors; • HOME and WORK are among the most frequently visited loca- tions, and, as such, the relevance R is a fundamental feature for their semantic identification. These observations hold true across different datasets with completely different properties. Based on above observations, we have derived a mobility framework where we are able to classify PoIs, the users and the way they move along PoIs, as well as the semantic meaning of PoIs. We have validated our framework with extensive experimen- tal work.