Comparing the Spatial Mobility of Residents and Tourists by using Geotagged Tweets

The human spatial mobility information is in high demand in various businesses; however, there are only few studies on human mobility because spatio-temporal data is insufficient and difficult to collect. Now with the spread of smartphones and the advent of social networking services, the spatio-temporal data began to occur on a large scale, and the data is available to the public. In this work, we compared the movement behavior of residents and tourists by using geo-tagged tweets which contain location information. We chose Seoul to be the target area for analysis. Various creative concepts and analytical methods are used: grid map concept, cells visited concept, reverse geocoding concept, average activity index, spatial mobility index, and determination of residents and visitors based on the number of days in residence. Conducting a series of analysis, we found significant differences of the movement behavior between local residents and tourists. We also discovered differences in visiting activity according to residential countries and used applications. We expect that findings of this research can provide useful information on tourist development and urban development. Tweets, Spatio-temporal Data, Residence