A context-aware web-mapping system for group-targeted offers using semantic technologies

•POI owners can customize their target group without relying on the developers.•Deals with some disadvantages of knowledge-based systems.•Uses and extends the well-known schema.org ontology for interoperability.•Provides a web based rule editor to create rules-offering policies at run time.•Displays contextualized group-targeted offering policies to regular users.

Existing location based systems that propose offers to their users do not provide points of interest (POIs) owners with the capability to flexibly customize their target groups of people/customers based on their context but they simply rely on the pre-determined application’s methods to approach them. These systems also suffer from information overload, often providing offers to a user that are neither valid nor interesting because they do not match his/her context. Moreover, these offering strategies are not interoperable among different systems. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an innovative web-mapping context-aware system called “SPLIS” (Semantic Personalized Location Information System) that utilizes Semantic Web technologies for delivering group-targeted offers from POI owners to users/potential customers. The presented system (a) adopts the schema.org ontology, (b) uses RuleML-compatible rules to represent group-targeted POI offers, (c) combines at run-time the above to match user context with suitable offers, and finally, (d) visualizes offers in an intuitive way. The paper also reports on a user evaluation of the system.