The convergence of newly interactive Web-based technologies with growing practices of user-generated content disseminated on the Internet is generating a remarkable new form of geographic information. Citizens are using handheld devices to collect geographic information and contribute it to crowd-sourced data sets, using Web-based mapping interfaces to mark and annotate geographic features, or adding geographic location to photographs, text, and other media shared online. These phenomena, which generate what we refer to collectively as volunteered geographic information (VGI), represent a paradigmatic shift in how geographic information is created and shared and by whom, as well as its content and characteristics. This article, which draws on our recently completed inventory of VGI initiatives, is intended to frame the crucial dimensions of VGI for geography and geographers, with an eye toward identifying its potential in our field, as well as the most pressing research needed to realize this potential. D...

Researching Volunteered Geographic Information: Spatial Data, Geographic Research, and New Social Practice

This paper describes a new real-time urban monitoring system. The system uses the Localizing and Handling Network Event Systems (LocHNESs) platform developed by Telecom Italia for the real-time evaluation of urban dynamics based on the anonymous monitoring of mobile cellular networks. In addition, data are supplemented based on the instantaneous positioning of buses and taxis to provide information about urban mobility in real time, ranging from traffic conditions to the movements of pedestrians throughout the city. This system was exhibited at the Tenth International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. It marks the unprecedented monitoring of a large urban area, which covered most of the city of Rome, in real time using a variety of sensing systems and will hopefully open the way to a new paradigm of understanding and optimizing urban dynamics.

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Real-Time Urban Monitoring Using Cell Phones: A Case Study in Rome

Human mobility: Models and applications

Using an algorithm to analyze opportunistically collected mobile phone location data, the authors estimate weekday and weekend travel patterns of a large metropolitan area with high accuracy.

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Estimating Origin-Destination Flows Using Mobile Phone Location Data

Novel methods and tools are being developed to explore the significance of the new types of user-related spatiotemporal data. This approach helps uncover the presence and movements of tourists from cell phone network data and the georeferenced photos they generate. A city's visitors have many ways of leaving voluntary or involuntary electronic trails: prior to their visits, tourists generate server log entries when they consult digital maps or travel Web sites; during their visit, they leave traces on wireless networks whenever they use their mobile phones; and after their visit, they might add online reviews and photos. Broadly speaking then, there are two types of footprint: active and passive. Passive tracks are left through interaction with an infrastructure, such as a mobile phone network, that produces entries in locational logs; active prints come from the users themselves when they expose locational data in photos, messages, and sensor measurements. In this article, we consider two types of digital traces from Rome, Italy: georeferenced photos made publicly available on the photo-sharing Web site Flickr and aggregate records of wireless network events generated by mobile phone users making calls and sending text messages on the Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) system.

Digital Footprinting: Uncovering Tourists with User-Generated Content

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 behaviour information valuable to urban planners, local authorities, and designer of location-based services. In this article, we describe our approach to collect and analyse the history of physical presence of tourists from the digital footprints they publicly disclose on the web. Our work takes place in the Province of Florence in Italy, where the insights on the visitors' flows and on the nationalities of the tourists who do not sleep in town has been limited to information from survey-based hotel and museums frequentation. In fact, most local authorities in the world must face this dearth of data on tourist dynamics. In this case study, we used a corpus of geographically referenced photos taken in the province by 4280 photographers over a period of two years. Based on the disclosure of the location of the photos, we design geovisualisations to reveal the tourist concentration and spatio-temporal flows. Our initial results provide insights on the density of tourists, the points of interests they visit as well as the most common trajectories they follow.

/pdf/leveraging-explicitly-disclosed-location-information-to-9fyn9i70i0.pdf

Leveraging explicitly disclosed location information to understand tourist dynamics: a case study

“Nomads at last”? A set of perspectives on how mobile technology may affect travel

In literature about knowledge management and sociology of innovation, the concepts of community and network are often superimposed if not used in an undifferentiated way. This deprives them of part of their heuristic power. In this article, the two concepts are revisited under a common framework of reference: placing them at the two extremes of a continuum of the different possible relationships (hetero directed vs. self-directed) between an agent and the environment in which it operates. Communities are social containers for incremental innovation, whereas networks are the place for boundary-spanning learning and as a consequence, for radical innovation.

Communities Versus Networks: The Implications on Innovation and Social Change

Novel methods and tools are being developed to explore the significance of new types of user-related spatiotemporal data. The approach described here helps uncover the presence and movements of tourists from cell phone network data and the georeferenced photos they generate.

Filippo Dal Fiore

Papers

Digital Footprinting: Uncovering Tourists with User-Generated Content

Leveraging explicitly disclosed location information to understand tourist dynamics: a case study

“Nomads at last”? A set of perspectives on how mobile technology may affect travel

Communities Versus Networks: The Implications on Innovation and Social Change

digital Footprinting: Uncovering t ourists with User-Generated Content