159 research outputs found

    Crowd-sourced Photographic Content for Urban Recreational Route Planning

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    Routing services are able to provide travel directions for users of all modes of transport. Most of them are focusing on functional journeys (i.e. journeys linking given origin and destination with minimum cost) while paying less attention to recreational trips, in particular leisure walks in an urban context. These walks are additionally predefined by time or distance and as their purpose is the process of walking itself, the attractiveness of areas that are passed by can be an important factor in route selection. This factor is hard to be formalised and requires a reliable source of information, covering the entire street network. Previous research shows that crowd-sourced data available from photo-sharing services has a potential for being a measure of space attractiveness, thus becoming a base for a routing system that suggests leisure walks, and ongoing PhD research aims to build such system. This paper demonstrates findings on four investigated data sources (Flickr, Panoramio, Picasa and Geograph) in Central London and discusses the requirements to the algorithm that is going to be implemented in the second half of this PhD research. Visual analytics was chosen as a method for understanding and comparing obtained datasets that contain hundreds of thousands records. Interactive software was developed to find a number of problems, as well as to estimate the suitability of the sources in general. It was concluded that Picasa and Geograph have problems making them less suitable for further research while Panoramio and Flickr require filtering to remove photographs that do not contribute to understanding of local attractiveness. Based on this analysis a number of filtering methods were proposed in order to improve the quality of datasets and thus provide a more reliable measure to support urban recreational routing

    A Big Data Analytics Method for Tourist Behaviour Analysis

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    Ā© 2016 Elsevier B.V. Big data generated across social media sites have created numerous opportunities for bringing more insights to decision-makers. Few studies on big data analytics, however, have demonstrated the support for strategic decision-making. Moreover, a formal method for analysing social media-generated big data for decision support is yet to be developed, particularly in the tourism sector. Using a design science research approach, this study aims to design and evaluate a ā€˜big data analyticsā€™ method to support strategic decision-making in tourism destination management. Using geotagged photos uploaded by tourists to the photo-sharing social media site, Flickr, the applicability of the method in assisting destination management organisations to analyse and predict tourist behavioural patterns at specific destinations is shown, using Melbourne, Australia, as a representative case. Utility was confirmed using both another destination and directly with stakeholder audiences. The developed artefact demonstrates a method for analysing unstructured big data to enhance strategic decision making within a real problem domain. The proposed method is generic, and its applicability to other big data streams is discussed

    A Big Data Analytics Method for Tourist Behaviour Analysis

    Get PDF
    Ā© 2016 Elsevier B.V. Big data generated across social media sites have created numerous opportunities for bringing more insights to decision-makers. Few studies on big data analytics, however, have demonstrated the support for strategic decision-making. Moreover, a formal method for analysing social media-generated big data for decision support is yet to be developed, particularly in the tourism sector. Using a design science research approach, this study aims to design and evaluate a ā€˜big data analyticsā€™ method to support strategic decision-making in tourism destination management. Using geotagged photos uploaded by tourists to the photo-sharing social media site, Flickr, the applicability of the method in assisting destination management organisations to analyse and predict tourist behavioural patterns at specific destinations is shown, using Melbourne, Australia, as a representative case. Utility was confirmed using both another destination and directly with stakeholder audiences. The developed artefact demonstrates a method for analysing unstructured big data to enhance strategic decision making within a real problem domain. The proposed method is generic, and its applicability to other big data streams is discussed

    Exploring human mobility patterns based on geotagged Flickr photos

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    Predicting human mobility behaviour has long been a topic of scientiļ¬c interest. Such studies generally rely on tracking human movements through a range of data collection methodologies such as using GPS trackers, cellular network data etc. Some of this data may be conļ¬dential or hard to acquire. This thesis explores if existing publicly available data on online photo sharing platforms can be used to determine human mobility patterns with reasonable accuracy. We choose the Flickr website as the data collection medium as it has an extensive user base actively sharing photos many of which, have geo tags embedded in them which are preserved by Flickr. Our analysis reveals that while the data from Flickr is sparse and discontinuous making it unsuitable for reliable mobility prediction, typical human mobility trends based on time of day, day of week and month of the year can still be extracted. Such interesting patterns could be potentially used in traļ¬ƒc engineering domains or for user proļ¬ling purposes. More speciļ¬cally, we describe how to obtain a subset of frequent active users and their information from Flickr, and the sliding window mechanism to ļ¬lter the active periods of the users. Later we explain the various statistical methods applied on the ļ¬ltered subset of data to identify the categories in which users could be classiļ¬ed, mainly short distance travellers and long distance travellers. The short distance travellers are considered for mobility trends prediction

    A big-data analytics method for capturing visitor activities and flows: the case of an island country

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    Ā© 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. Understanding how people move from one location to another is important both for smart city planners and destination managers. Big-data generated on social media sites have created opportunities for developing evidence-based insights that can be useful for decision-makers. While previous studies have introduced observational data analysis methods for social media data, there remains a need for method developmentā€”specifically for capturing peopleā€™s movement flows and behavioural details. This paper reports a study outlining a new analytical method, to explore peopleā€™s activities, behavioural, and movement details for people monitoring and planning purposes. Our method utilises online geotagged content uploaded by users from various locations. The effectiveness of the proposed method, which combines content capturing, processing and predicting algorithms, is demonstrated through a case study of the Fiji Islands. The results show good performance compared to other relevant methods and show applicability to national decisions and policies

    The Shortest Path to Happiness: Recommending Beautiful, Quiet, and Happy Routes in the City

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    When providing directions to a place, web and mobile mapping services are all able to suggest the shortest route. The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant. To quantify the extent to which urban locations are pleasant, we use data from a crowd-sourcing platform that shows two street scenes in London (out of hundreds), and a user votes on which one looks more beautiful, quiet, and happy. We consider votes from more than 3.3K individuals and translate them into quantitative measures of location perceptions. We arrange those locations into a graph upon which we learn pleasant routes. Based on a quantitative validation, we find that, compared to the shortest routes, the recommended ones add just a few extra walking minutes and are indeed perceived to be more beautiful, quiet, and happy. To test the generality of our approach, we consider Flickr metadata of more than 3.7M pictures in London and 1.3M in Boston, compute proxies for the crowdsourced beauty dimension (the one for which we have collected the most votes), and evaluate those proxies with 30 participants in London and 54 in Boston. These participants have not only rated our recommendations but have also carefully motivated their choices, providing insights for future work.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 201
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