REAL-ESTATE 2.0

Informed Real-Estate Services: Leveraging Web 2.0





Architecture

RE_services The overall architecture and e-services that will be implemented in RealEstate2.0 is depicted in the following Figure. There are three layers, namely Real Estate Services, Integration, and Crawling.

Real Estate services layer

The Real Estate (RE) Services layer encompasses modules that implement novel real-estate e-services using state of the art Web 2.0 technologies (mashups) as well as the integrated data and access services supported by the RealEstate2.0 system. These advanced e-services targeting RE professional and individual retailers will include: (a) Personalized access to Properties using spatial, temporal and content related preferences, (b) Intelligent Property Analysis using location context and (c) Real Estate Analytics over time and Reporting.

The above end-user services will be based on four core services supported by the RealEstate2.0 system and existing Web 2.0 mashups: the geo-navigator will enable users to explore several areas through external services like Google Earth within the properties of interest; the social content browsing will provide direct access to what people are stating regarding real-estate locations, areas, and relevant POIs; the spatial/temporal querying will handle the formulation of spatial and temporal predicates involving POIs and property features; finally the value projection service will use past real-estate values within an area to forecast future real estate prices.

integration layer

The Integration layer provides a syndicated view of information: POIs, social content and real-estate data (dash lines in the above figure link data sets to be integrated, arrow lines depict the flow of data). The core RE services use this layer through the access API module, which supplies an interface for querying the consolidated data by setting spatial and temporal constraints. The integration procedure is as follows. Archived Social Media content and POIs are processed offline by the location extraction module to identify and extract location information that possibly exists. The extracted location information goes through the geo referencing module that assigns a specific map location or area to a POI or social content item. This module is also responsible for relating real-estate locations to points and areas on the map. As a result, real-estate information (properties and value zones, listings, points of interest, demographics, financial and economical growth data, development dynamics, transportation means, retail, security and health data, etc), and social content data get annotated with map coordinates. Those annotations are kept in the metadata repository allowing the consolidation of all information based on spatial and temporal predicates.

crawling layer

The Crawling layer aims to obtain various kinds of RE information from selected web services by using focused crawlers. The kinds of RE information include: (a) POIs that contain metadata such as name, description, category, location, (b) social content that contain info such as id, date, free text, rating, media and (c) open data that contain metadata about the type, the cover area, the lisence and the format. The collected data are transformed to a common form for each type and are stored in the POI, social content and open data archive, together with time annotations required by the RE analytics. Moreover, the module follows an intelligent refresh policy for launching new crawlings only when the relevant sites contain updated information. The archive then feeds the integration layer, as described earlier.

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