MAT-Builder: a system to build semantically enriched trajectories

The notion of multiple aspect trajectory (MAT) has been recently introduced in the literature to represent movement data that is heavily semantically enriched with dimensions (aspects) representing various types of semantic information (e.g., stops, moves, weather, traffic, events, and points of interest). Aspects may be large in number, heterogeneous, or structurally complex. Although there is a growing volume of literature addressing the modelling and analysis of multiple aspect trajectories, the community suffers from a general lack of publicly available datasets. This is due to privacy concerns that make it difficult to publish such type of data, and to the lack of tools that are capable of linking raw spatio-temporal data to different types of semantic contextual data. In this work we aim to address this last issue by presenting MAT-Builder, a system that not only supports users during the whole semantic enrichment process, but also allows the use of a variety of external data sources. Furthermore, MAT-Builder has been designed with modularity and extensibility in mind, thus enabling practitioners to easily add new functionalities. The running example provided towards the end of the paper highlights how MAT-Builder's main features allow users to easily generate multiple aspect trajectories, hence benefiting the mobility data analysis community.