An architecture for surroundings discovery by linking 3D models and LOD cloud

The Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud contains vast spatio-temporal information that can be exploited by the location-based mobile applications and presented using Augmented Reality (AR). While AR shows to be well suited for searching and browsing location-based information, most approaches focus on domain specific scenarios and there is no generic data model for the information search and discovery that could be re-used in various applications. The geo-referenced data, however, is already available on the LOD cloud and can be exploited to provide location-based information to the user. With this approach, in this paper, we present a generic architecture for the surroundings discovery mobile applications. The 3D models that we publish on the LOD cloud represent the real world objects that belong to different temporal intervals. These geometric models allow the user to mentally construct the referential relationship between virtual and real-world objects and the mobile applciation developer to create experiences based on different concepts on the cloud. This way, the LOD cloud, which is a growing structured source of semantic data, becomes the main source of information for the architecture, and facilitates the knowledge discovery. We also extend our mobile location-based application, ARCAMA-3D ( Augmented Reality for Context Aware Mobile Applications with 3D ) that we have developed previously, by using this architecture.