ScenicPlanner： planning scenic travel routes leveraging heterogeneous user-generated digital footprints

To facilitate the travel preparation process to a city, a lot of work has been done to recommend a POI or a sequence of POIs automatically to satisfy users＇ needs. How- ever, most of the existing work ignores the issue of planning the detailed travel routes between POIs, leaving the task to online map services or commercial GPS navigators. Such a service or navigator in terms of suggesting the shortest travel distance or time, which cannot meet the diverse requirements of users. For instance, in the case of traveling by driving for leisure purpose, the scenic view along the travel routes would be of great importance to users, and a good planning ser- vice should put the sceneries of the route in higher priority rather than the distance or time taken. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel framework called ScenicPlanner for route recommendation, leveraging a combination of get- tagged image and check-in digital footprints from location- based social networks （LBSNs）. First, we enrich the road net- work and assign a proper scenic view score to each road seg- ment to model the scenic road network, by extracting relevant information from get-tagged images and check-ins. Then, we apply heuristic algorithms to iteratively add road segment and determine the travelling order of added road segments with the objective of maximizing the total scenic view score while satisfying the user-specified constraints （i.e., origin, desti- nation and the total travel distance）. Finally, to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed framework, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world data sets from the Bay Area in the city of San Francisco, which con- tain a road network crawled from OpenStreetMap, more than 31 000 geo-tagged images generated by 1 571 Flickr users in one year, and 110 214 check-ins left by 15 680 Foursquare users in six months.

Human’s digital footprints on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau:Variations during festivals and impacts on nature reserves

Mobile internet and wireless communication technologies have produced unprecedented location-aware data.Such big geospatial data can be used as a proxy measure of the‘digital footprints’left by us on the planet and provide a valuable opportunity to understand the dynamic and short-term human disturbance on the nature at fine scales.This study investigated the spatiotemporal variations of human’s digital footprints on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau using smartphone-users-generated Tencent’s location request data.The results showed that human’s digital footprints cover less than 5%of Qinghai and Tibet,exhibiting either a U-shaped or an N-shaped temporal change pattern during the major festivals.Spatial changes of the digital footprints manifested a transition process from dispersion to concentration in Xining and Lhasa.Human disturbance assessment of seven large nature reserves on the plateau showed that the Qinghai Lake is the most disturbed one as shown by 14.6%of its area is stained with human digital footprints and the areal average of footprint intensity is 1.59,and the disturbance was significantly escalated during the National Day holiday.By contrast,the Qangtang and Hoh Xil are the least affected nature reserves with the two indices less than 1%and 0.1,respectively.

Virtual Visitor＇s Behavior in Tourism Destinations＇ Online Portals： Analysis of Spain.info Website

The incorporation of information technologies （ITs） in the tourism sector has enabled marketing actions to be enhanced through websites. In this context, destinations＇ online portals have become a key tool to promote territories. Vast amount of money is invested in developing these virtual sites and lately, also increasing interest has been put towards their performance analysis. This study has been applied to Spain.info website in order to track virtual visitors＇ digital footprint. The analysis conducted through the Destination Web Monitor （DWM） system has allowed taking into consideration the behavior of visitors in the website in order to obtain results on their interests when visiting the portal. The article mainly focuses on Brazil, Russia, India, and China （BRIC）, considered as markets of opportunity for the tourism sector in Spain. Results provided insights on to whom, when, and how to develop potential e-marketing campaigns.