Towards acquisition of semantics of places and events by multi-perspective analysis of geotagged photo collections

Abstract

Due to the pervasiveness of positioning technology combined with the pro-liferation of social-oriented web sites, community-contributed spatio-temporal data of people's historical positions are available today in large amounts. The analysis of these data is valuable to scientists and can pro-vide important information about people's behavior, their movement, geo-graphical places, and events. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework and outline a methodology that allows to analyze events and places using geotagged photo collections shared by people from many countries. These data are often semantically annotated by titles and tags that are useful for learning facts about the geographical places and for de-tecting events occurring in these places. The knowledge obtained through our analysis carries an additional benefit. For example, it may also be uti-lized by local authorities, service providers, tourist agencies, in sociologi-cal and anthropological studies or for building user centric applications like tour recommender systems. We provide a conceptual foundation for the analysis of spatio-temporal data of places visited by people worldwide using community contributed geotagged photo collections. First, we define several types of spatio-temporal clusters of people's visits. Second, we dis-cuss methods that can be used for analysis of these clusters. Third, we of-fer an analysis of tourist activities in Switzerland based on a case study.