PMWare: a middleware for discovering and managing places of human interest

Most of the contextual dependent applications require high level location attributes in terms of places and routes, more than just fine-grained latitude and longitude. Currently, these applications perform place discovery and recognition in an isolated manner with very little coordination and collaboration with each other. This approach is inhibiting for the application developer as well as the endmobile user, as former has to write redundant and undesirable code for place discovery and the latter's device is subjected to redundant sensing, processing, storage, and higher energy consumption. In this paper we present a novel framework PMWare, which is a middleware that caters to place and route sensing needs of 3rd party applications in a unified and integrated manner. It provides an end-to-end service from sensing user's location to discovering high-level location attributes while providing interfaces for managing and storing large-scale human mobility patterns. PMWare handles the energy-accuracy tradeoff and uses triggered-sensing approach to reduce battery consumption. To demonstrate the end-to-end working of our middleware, we developed an application PlaceADs that uses place visiting history of a person to push relevant advertisements. We deployed this application among 16 participants in real-world to check the effectiveness of PMWare.