Uncovering the Perception of Urban Outdoor Areas Expressed in Social Media

Abstract

Learning about people's perception that emerges from urban areas has been an interesting multidisciplinary research goal because it has a great potential to ease the hard task of understanding intrinsic characteristics of urban areas. To this end, we propose an approach that explores spatial and semantic aspects in free-text messages shared on location-based social networks (LBSNs) for uncovering and mapping the perception reflected regarding urban outdoor areas. Studying outdoor areas of Chicago, we show that LBSN data carry valuable information about places and could also be used to extract urban perception, helping to better understand urban areas from many aspects. We demonstrate, through a survey with volunteers, that our approach has the potential to correctly capture the opinion considered by the users regarding the reflected perception of those areas, indicating that it could be a feasible alternative for the task under study.