First International Workshop on Trends in Pervasive and Ubiquitous Geotechnology and Geoinformation

The program of the First International Workshop on Trends in Pervasive and Ubiquitous Geotechnology and Geoinformation as part of GIScience 2008 is now online. I will present a position paper “Assessing pervasive user-generated content to describe tourist dynamics” on my ongoing study of people’s practice of geotagging and geoannotating photos in Flickr.

Abstract. In recent years, the large deployment of mobile devices has led to a massive increase in the volume of records of where people have been and when they were there. The analysis of these spatio-temporal data can supply high-level human behavior information valuable to urban planners, local authorities, and designers of location-based services. This paper proposes the study of publicly available people generated geo-referenced content to provide novel perspectives on tourist dynamics. Our initial works analyzed these digital footprints people leave behind them as a historic of physical presence when they visit a city. The results provided insights on the density of tourists, the points of interests they visit as well as the most common trajectories they follow. Yet to be able to fully analyze these newly available data, there is a need to understand the diverse circumstances they were generated from. We believe that the understanding of the human practice behind these data and their relation to the urban space could open a new perspective in analyzing tourism.

Relation to my thesis: An occasion to mingle with the GI Science community and understand how they perceive the increasing amounts of spatially relevant information (from both human factors and engineering challenges). For instance I have been interested in Brent Hecht’s GeoRS as a way to present Wikipedia knowledge repository as a geographic reference system.