Exploring Crowd Movement Behavior by Volunteered Geographic Information -A Case of Travel Activity

In recent years, with the fast development of Internet and the rapid growth of mobile devices, a number of social media have been developed. The data come from social media which often include “geotag”, “check-in” and other spatial information. Individual citizens use positioning tools to record and share their observed geographic information while using social media. This type of information is called Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). The emergence of VGI has a great influence on Geography, that even some scholars consider it as a paradigm shift for Geographic Information Science. Geographer are interested in the human spatial behavior but it was difficult to collect the data of human spatial behavior, such as individual’s travel time and activity locations. As a result, there were few studies focusing on crowd movement behavior in the past. However, VGI as a new type of geographic information source may be able to overcome the limitation of past studies and find a new way for movement behavior research. The purpose of this research aims to introduce a new approach for movement behavior research. Through case study, the movement behavior is analyzed by VGI to explore the movement behavior research. Also, the context and related concept of VGI are discussed. The study gathered 1,352,500 geotagged photos of 15,342 users generated between 2001 and 2015 from Flickr website and obtained 86 tourist sites and 176,810 traveler’s daily paths in the study area of Taipei city. Then, the data about tourist sites and traveler’s daily paths were used to analyze the movement behavior. The analysis of movement behavior focused on stopping places, travel paths, the connectivity between tourist sites, and the movement pattern of traveler. Moreover, in order to understand the behavior of different types of traveler, the travelers were categorized into foreign traveler, Taipei local traveler, and other Taiwan county’s traveler by their residence. The result indicated that foreign traveler, Taipei local traveler, and other Taiwan county’s traveler have different movement behavior in Taipei city. Exploring massive amount of VGI to understand the crowd movement behavior is indeed a new approach for movement behavior research.