Point of interest to region of interest conversion

Trajectories of people contain a vast amount of information on users' interests and popularity of locations. To obtain this information, the places visited by the owner of the device on such a trajectory need to be recognized. However, the location information on a point of interest (POI) in a database is normally limited to an address and a coordinate pair, rather than a polygon describing its boundaries. A region of interest can be used to intersect trajectories to match trajectories with objects of interest. In the absence of expensive and often not publicly available detailed spatial data like cadastral data, we need to approximate this ROI. In this paper, we present several approaches to approximate the size and shape of ROIs, by integrating data from multiple public sources, a validation technique, and a validation of these approaches against the cadastral data of the city of Enschede, The Netherlands.