  Although there are increasingly more initiatives for the generation of
semantic knowledge based on user participation, there is still a shortage of
platforms for regular users to create applications on which semantic data can
be exploited and generated automatically. We propose an architecture, called
Semantic Maps (SeMaps), for assisting the authoring and hosting of applications
in which the maps combine the aggregation of a Geographic Information System
and crowd-generated content (called here crowd maps). In these systems, the
digital map works as a blackboard for accommodating stories told by people
about events they want to share with others typically participating in their
social networks. SeMaps offers an environment for the creation and maintenance
of sites based on crowd maps with the possibility for the user to characterize
semantically that which s/he intends to mark on the map. The designer of a
crowd map, by informing a linguistic expression that designates what has to be
marked on the maps, is guided in a process that aims to associate a concept
from a common-sense base to this linguistic expression. Thus, the crowd maps
start to have dominion over common-sense inferential relations that define the
meaning of the marker, and are able to make inferences about the network of
linked data. This makes it possible to generate maps that have the power to
perform inferences and access external sources (such as DBpedia) that
constitute information that is useful and appropriate to the context of the
map. In this paper we describe the architecture of SeMaps and how it was
applied in a crowd map authoring tool.
