Discovering Landmark Preferences and Movement Patterns from Photo Postings

Natalia Andrienko Fraunhofer Institute Intell igent Analysis and Information Systems Siava Kisilevich Department of Computer and Information Science University of Konstanz This article presents a geovisual analytics approach to discovering people's preferences for landmarks and movement patterns from photos posted on the Flickr website . The approach combines an exploratory spatio-temporal analysis of geographic coordinates and dates representing locations and time of taking photos with basic thematic information avai lable through the Google Maps Web mapping service, and interpretation of the analyzed area. The article describes data aggregation and filtering techniques to reduce the size of the dataset and focu ses on information addressing research questions. The results of analysis for the Seattle metropolitan area help to distinguish between sites that are occasionally popular among the photographers and can be considered as potential attractions from sites that are regularly visited and already known as city landmarks. The analysis of photographers' movements across the metropolitan area shows that most photographers' itineraries are short and highly localized.