Cross-Cultural Study of Tourists Mobility Using Social Media

The vast availability of user-generated data in social networks, mainly those networks based on location, allows an unprecedented study of urban societies. This work proposes to study the mobility of tourists and residents in various cities around the world in possession of this kind of data, especially, exploring check-ins of Foursquare-Swarm and reviews made in TripAdvisor. From this data, we built a model based on graphs to represent the mobility of two groups of studied users under distinct periods of the day. This representation catches, in a certain way, the mobility's semantic, assuming not only the geographic coordinates but the type of venue visited. The results indicate that residents, generally, have mobility patterns more similar than tourists. We also observed that the geographical region, like the country, influences the noticed similarity in both groups. Our results suggest the possibility of the development of new recommendation systems specific for tourists that take into account the user origin.