EPUI: Experimental Platform for Urban Informatics

Abstract

Recent studies in urban navigation have revealed new demands (e.g., diversity, safety, happiness, serendipity) for the navigation services that are critical to providing useful recommendations to travelers. This exposes the need to design next-generation navigation services that accommodate these newly emerging aspects. In this paper, we present a prototype system, namely, EPUI (an Experimental Platform of Urban Informatics), which provides a testbed for exploring and evaluating venues and route recommendation solutions that balance between different objectives (i.e., demands) including the newly discovered ones. In addition, EPUI incorporates a modularized design, enabling researchers to upload their own algorithms and compare them to well-known algorithms using different performance metrics. Its user interface makes it easily usable by both end-user and experienced researchers.