Understanding mobility patterns and user activities from geo-tagged social networks data

Abstract

Social networks are strongly present in the daily life of modern society. Most people use these social networks to share information about their lives, their opinions, places they visit and their state of mind. Generally, these posts are composed of various information, being the location of the users location part of the data. The purpose of this work is to obtain the location of the posts and observe the users mobility pattern in the city of Porto, Portugal. This paper discusses the technologies available for obtaining the data, the social networks currently worth studying and their respective restrictions. It also explores new approaches to collect the data from the desired social networks, respecting all restrictions currently applied. The different software solutions developed for the social networks interactions are explored and described in depth. Subsequently, the necessary software for social networks is reviewed, the possible algorithms for data mining are discussed and its implementation is presented. Finally, the results obtained are interpreted and studied according to the characteristics of the city, tourism promotions and transport routes.