Understanding the context of a person’s interaction with a place is important to enabling ubiquitous computing applications. The ability for mobile computing to provide information and services that are relevant to a user’s current location—which is central to the vision of ubiquitous computing—requires that the technologies be able to characterize the activities that a person may potentially perform in place, whatever this place may be. To support the user as she goes about her day, this ability to characterize the potential activities for a place must support work on a city scale. In this dissertation, we present a method to process place-specific community-authored content (e.g., Yelp.com reviews) to identify a set of the potential activities (articulated as verb-noun pairs) that a person can perform at a specific place and apply this method for places on a city scale. We validate the method by processing the place-specific reviews authored by community members of Yelp.com and show that the majority of the 40 most common verb-noun pairs are true activities that can be performed at the respective place; achieving an average mean precision of up to 79.3% and recall of up to 55.9%. We applied this method by developing a Web-service (the Activity Service) that automatically processes all the places reviewed for a city and provides structured access to the activity data that can be identified for the respective places. To validate that the place and activity data is useful and useable, we developed and evaluated two applications that are supported by the Activity Service: Opportunities Exist and Vocabulary Wallpaper. In addition to these applications, we conducted a design contest to identify other types of applications that can be supported by the Activity Service. Finally, we discuss limitations of the activity data and the Activity Service, and highlight future considerations.

Understanding the context of a person’s interaction with a place is important to enabling ubiquitous computing applications. The ability for mobile computing to provide information and services that are relevant to a user’s current location—which is central to the vision of ubiquitous computing—requires that the technologies be able to characterize the activities that a person may potentially perform in place, whatever this place may be. To support the user as she goes about her day, this ability to characterize the potential activities for a place must support work on a city scale. In this dissertation, we present a method to process place-specific community-authored content (e.g., Yelp.com reviews) to identify a set of the potential activities (articulated as verb-noun pairs) that a person can perform at a specific place and apply this method for places on a city scale. We validate the method by processing the place-specific reviews authored by community members of Yelp.com and show that the majority of the 40 most common verb-noun pairs are true activities that can be performed at the respective place; achieving an average mean precision of up to 79.3% and recall of up to 55.9%. We applied this method by developing a Web-service (the Activity Service) that automatically processes all the places reviewed for a city and provides structured access to the activity data that can be identified for the respective places. To validate that the place and activity data is useful and useable, we developed and evaluated two applications that are supported by the Activity Service: Opportunities Exist and Vocabulary Wallpaper. In addition to these applications, we conducted a design contest to identify other types of applications that can be supported by the Activity Service. Finally, we discuss limitations of the activity data and the Activity Service, and highlight future considerations.