Point of interest

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A point of interest (POI) is a specific point location that someone may find useful or interesting. An example is a point on the Earth representing the location of the Eiffel Tower, or a point on Mars representing the location of its highest mountain, Olympus Mons. Most consumers use the term when referring to hotels, campsites, fuel stations or any other categories used in modern automotive navigation systems.

Users of a mobile device can be provided with geolocation and time aware POI service^[1] that recommends geolocations nearby and with a temporal relevance (e.g. POI to special services in a ski resort are available only in winter).

The term is widely used in

A region of interest (ROI) and a volume of interest (VOI) are similar in concept, denoting a region or a volume (which may contain various individual POIs).

In medical fields such as

Digital maps for modern GPS devices typically include a basic selection of POI for the map area.[3]

However, websites exist that specialize in the collection, verification, management and distribution of POI which

• A lack of
  GPX
  is a notable attempt to address this).
• Attempts by some software vendors to protect their data through obfuscation.
• Licensing
  issues that prevent companies from using competitor's file specifications.
• floating point latitude and longitude co-ordinates into smaller integer
  values.
• Speed and battery life (operations using
  floating point
  values).
• Requirements to add custom fields to the data.
• Use of older reference systems that predate
  British national grid reference system
  )
• Readability/possibility to edit (plain text files are human-readable and may be edited)

• ASCII Text (.asc .txt .csv .plt)
• Topografix
  GPX
  (.gpx)
• Garmin Mapsource (.gdb)
• Google Earth Keyhole Markup Language (.kml .kmz)
• Pocket Street Pushpins (.psp)
• Maptech Marks (.msf)
• Maptech Waypoint (.mxf)
• Microsoft MapPoint Pushpin (.csv)
• OziExplorer (.wpt)
• TomTom Overlay (.ov2) and TomTom plain text format (.asc)
• OpenStreetMap data (.osm)

• Automotive navigation system
• Geocoded photograph
• Map database management
• OpenLR
• Tourist attraction
• World Geodetic System (Used to represent GPS co-ordinates)

References