3cixty: Building comprehensive knowledge bases for city exploration

Planning a visit to Expo Milano 2015 or simply touring in Milan are activities that require a certain amount of a priori knowledge of the city. In this paper, we present the process of building such comprehensive knowledge bases that contain descriptions of events and activities, places and sights, transportation facilities as well as social activities, collected from numerous static, near- and real-time local and global data providers, including hyper local sources such as the Expo Milano 2015 official services and several social media platforms. Entities in the 3cixty KB are deduplicated, interlinked and enriched using semantic technologies. The 3cixty KB is empowering the ExplorMI 360 multi-device application, which has been officially endorsed by the E015 Technical Management Board and has gained the patronage of Expo Milano in 2015, thus has offered a unique testing scenario for the 20 million visitors along the 6 months of the exhibit. In 2016–2017, new knowledge bases have been created for the cities of London, Madeira and Singapore, as well as for the entire French Cote d’Azur area. The 3cixty KB is accessible at https://kb.3cixty.com/sparql while ExplorMI 360 at https://www.3cixty.com and in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.