Accepted: Paper at LBS2007

The outcome of the work performed during this Spring’s stay at the MIT has been accepted for full presentation at the 4th International Symposium on LBS and Telecartography, November 8-10, 2007 in Hong Kong. The paper is entitled “Understanding of Tourist Dynamics from Explicitly Disclosed Location Information” by Fabien Girardin, Filippo Dal Fiore, Josep Blat, and Carlo Ratti

Abstract: In the recent years, the large deployment of mobile devices led to a massive increase in the volume of records of where people have been and when they were there. The analysis of the accumulated archives of such spatio-temporal data can derive high-level human behavior information valuable to urban planers, traffic engineers, and tourism authorities. In this paper, we describe our approach to analyze the history of physical presence of tourists from the digital footprints they publicly make available on the world-wide web. Our work takes context in the Province of Florence where besides data from survey-based hotel and museums frequentation, tourism authorities have limited information on the fluxes of visitors (i.e. previous and next destination) and on the nationalities of the tourists who do not sleep in town (i.e. excursionists). As a proof of concept, we used a corpus of 85910 publicly disclosed geotagged photos taken in the province by 3348 photographers over a period of 2 years. Based on the time, explicit location and people’s description of their photos, we design geovisualizations to reveal the tourist activity and flows in space and time. They provide insights on the density of tourists in the area the flow and activity of tourists within, in and on of that area.

Keywords: Spatio-temporal data analysis, geovisualization, location-disclosure, location-based services.

Relation to my thesis: Tracing the Visitor’s Eye is off to a good start. Plus now there is a shot to get the paper accepted in an upcoming book on Location-Based Services and Telecartography. Finally, this conf might be the opportunity to meet Jonathan Raper who will keynote.