On the practicalities of place-based virtual communities: Ontology-based querying, application architecture, and performance

•We propose a new approach for constructing context-aware mobile services for a place.•A knowledge base that captures static and dynamic aspects of a place is useful.•A Place-Based Virtual Community for a place augments the place with services.•We present our system based on our ontology with performance evaluation.

While the Internet has allowed geographical boundaries to be transcended, with the increasing use of the mobile Internet, there is a shift towards a focus on locality and place-specific applications. This paper proposes a novel approach for constructing context-aware mobile services for a place using a commonly shared knowledge base, that captures not only static but dynamic aspects of a place. The approach is based on a conceptual model of a Place-Based Virtual Community (PBVC), represented using an ontology; a PBVC for a place augments the place with context-aware services based on querying an ontology. We present an implementation of a framework based on the ontology and an evaluation of the performance of queries over the ontology. We also illustrate architectures of specific applications as specialisation of a generic PlaceComm architecture.