From time to time I introduce new Start-ups which are related somehow with geoinformation systems and geospatial data. In this post I describe a company named LOVO.
The platform allows users to create their own profiles and build up a community providing authentical information about:
- Restaurants
- accommodation
- leisure
- night life
- shopping
- etc.
This concept is very similar to a lot of community platforms out there.
See comment from Mr. Fleischhacker: “We think, that LOVO is NOT very similar to other platforms. The big difference is, that LOVO is not a directory of POI, but a context sensitive recommendation engine (it took more than 10.000 days to develop this recommender engine!) This semantic expert system takes into account the region, the actual weathersituation and weatherforecast for this region, the profile of the user and the behavior of the lifestylegroup of the user. Besides this also day of time and season are taken into account.”
Fleischhacker, the founder of the Austrian start-up explained the main function of the platform as real time guide and expert system for leisure, gastronomy, sports and culture.
“Lovo is a highly specialized travel guide, which uses functionality of a social network in a different manner.” (Fleischhacker)
Profile based and location relevant information about sports, bars and tourist attractions can be requested via the Internet or SMS on the mobile phone. Semantics plays an important role in the architecture of the system – each object revers to a semantic metalanguage.
In the morning the service recommends different location based tips than in the evening, the suggestion differs if today there is a temperature of 35°C or if it is a cold and rainy day.
Lovo.cc was founded in 2003, and they have worked on different research missions since 2003, one of them decision making for leisure. I think this is not so far away from my study center of spatial decision support systems. I’m curious about to know if spatial decision support techniques are used in their platform and if yes, which ones. In 2005 they have started to program their social platform with J2EE. The emphasis is on open-source software like jBoss, Postresql, Hibernate Spring, Lucene and Linux.
External service like Google Maps for geocoding, LBS platform of T-mobile for mobile device positioning, different transport companies for train and bus schedule, SMS gateways and wetter.at for the weather. See further partner in the comment of Mr. Fleischhacker!
Further partners are “diePresse” and Google. Since 2003 more then 4 millions Euros were invested by the founders, the department of trade and industry, and the city of Vienna.
[loco.cc, orf.at]
Thank you for presenting our Service in your blog!
I would like to concetize some aspects of our Lifestyle-Guide:
We think, that LOVO is NOT very similar to other platforms. The big difference is, that LOVO is not a directory of POI, but a context sensitive recommendation engine (it took more than 10.000 days to develop this recommender engine!) This semantic expert system takes into account the region, the actual weathersituation and weatherforecast for this region, the profile of the user and the behavior of the lifestylegroup of the user. Besides this also day of time and season are taken into account.
You can use LOVO on the web (www.lovo.cc), on the mobile web (http://m.lovo.cc) and via SMS, MMS or email.
If you can tell me, what you mean with “spatial decision support techniques” I would try ta answer your question.
We have a lot of partners already, e.g. Die Presse and Google (as already mentioned). But furthermore: WienTourismus, Niederösterreich-Card, Tourismus Salzburg, SalzburgerLand Tourismus, Tirol Werbung, Vorarlberg Tourismus, Österreich Werbung, Mediengruppe Österreich, wetter.at, traffic24.at, Verkehrsverbund Ostregion, Steirischer Verkehrsverbund, Linz Linien, Tiroler Verkehrsverbund, Salzburger Verkehrsverbund, American Express, T-Mobile and 30 further partnerships in D,A,CH are on the way…
Thanx again for your interest in LOVO!
Best regards
Roland
Thanks for your reply. It is always a pleasure for me to introduce interesting new GIS-related services to my users, especially if they are developed in Austria. I appreciate your valuable comments on my external view on your service platform. Your comment enables a better description of LOVO, and I’ll try to integrate this information as post update.
Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSS, German term: Räumliche Entscheidungsunterstützungssysteme) are a subset or branch of decision support systems (DSS). A DSS is broadly defined as a computer-based information system that affects or is intended to affect the way people make decisions. An SDSS is an interactive, computer-based system designed to support a user or group of users in achieving a higher effectiveness of decision making while solving a semi-structured decision problem. In other words decision support means that the system helps the user to explore the decision problem in an interactive and recursive fashion in all phases of the decision making process.
One field of SDSS is called Multi-criteria Spatial Decision Support Systems (MC-SDSS). There large sets of feasible decision alternatives are evaluated according to multiple conflicting evaluation criteria. In most cases there are a huge set of spatial and non-spatial attributes which influence a decision process. All these attributes are normalized and weighted and applied to a decision rule which results in a ranked list of decision alternatives. The best ranked decision alternative is considered to be the optimal decision strategy in the defined case.
Techniques include for example: Operations Research techniques, network optimization models, Multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) model (e.g., Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA), Concordance, Ideal Point Analysis, Simple Additive Weighting (SAW), Rank Order Decision Rule), Artificial neural networks, spatial regression, spatial clustering, etc.
Further readings:
Malczewski, J., 1999. GIS and Multicriteria Decision Analysis New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Thanks again for your comment and all the best to you.
Cheers, js
featuring a web service that is online since 2007 from a company that was founded in 2003 is not exactly ‘introducing a new start-up’
but well, i have bigger concerns with you copying other authors’ sentences without citing the source (it took me about half a minute to find 3 sentences from your comment on google scholar). sorry, that’s not good style – not on a blog and especially not if trying to promote your scientific work.
Thanks for your feedback and critism. First of all “new” is a relative term. For some readers this is new for others it isn’t. Second this blog does not claim to be scientific. Posts do not include full scientific styled citations, althrough it is tried to name the source (end of text in brackets) for most posts. If this does not satisfy your needs maybe its better to use another information source.
I really like this blog good job.