Abstract
Social media data analytics is the art of extracting valuable hidden insights from vast amounts of semi-structured and unstructured social media data to enable informed and insightful decision-making. Analysis of social media data has been applied for discovering patterns that may support urban planning decisions in smart cities. In this paper, Weibo social media data are used to analyze social-geographic human mobility in the CBD area of Shanghai to track citizen’s behavior. Our main motivation is to test the validity of geo-located Weibo data as a source for discovering human mobility and activity patterns. In addition, our goal is to identify important locations in people’s lives with the support of location-based services. The algorithms used are described and the results produced are presented using adequate visualization techniques to illustrate the detected human mobility patterns obtained by the large-scale social media data in order to support smart city planning decisions. The outcome of this research is helpful not only for city planners, but also for business developers who hope to extend their services to citizens.
Highlights
Modeling human mobility in a city is tightly related to geographical patterns and spatial distributions
In the case of mobility patterns associated with users in social media, this kind of tool provides insights to understand the distribution of users, how and when they interact with each other, and where they move in a specific region
As a social media channel, Sina Weibo provides a large amount of information that has been proven to be valuable in terms of mobility pattern discovery
Summary
Modeling human mobility in a city is tightly related to geographical patterns and spatial distributions. A significant effort has been made with different types of datasets, including phone call records (CDR) [9], WiFi or RFID [10,11], global positioning system (GPS) [12] and location-based social network (LBSN) [13] data, in order to obtain useful information from geographical movements. In this area, researchers have tried to tackle various questions: Does human mobility follow any model or pattern? Human mobility research can be accomplished using a different and complementary perspective, depending on the goal of the analysis
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