City nexus: discovering pairs of jointly-visited locations based on geo-tagged posts in social networks

Abstract

Recently, there is a rapid growth in the use of microblogs, such as Twitter, and of social networks, such as Instagram, to publish geo-tagged posts that indicate the location of the user at the time when the message is sent. This provides abundant geospatial data that can be analyzed to understand the behavior of masses of people, in particular in urban. Such analysis can improve and facilitate the work of urban planners and of policy makers, e.g., when deciding where to add transportation routes or public institutes. In this demonstration, we present a system that utilizes geo-tagged posts to discover places that were jointly visited by many people. We present the management and the analysis of the data, to illustrate the feasibility of the approach and to indicate new research questions in this domain.