Where’s everybody? Comparing the use of heatmaps to uncover cities’ tacit social context in smartphones and pervasive displays

Andreas Komninos (), Jeries Besharat, Denzil Ferreira, John Garofalakis and Vassilis Kostakos
Additional contact information
Andreas Komninos: University of Patras
Jeries Besharat: University of Patras
Denzil Ferreira: University of Oulu
John Garofalakis: University of Patras
Vassilis Kostakos: University of Oulu

Information Technology & Tourism, 2017, vol. 17, issue 4, No 2, 399-427

Abstract: Abstract We introduce HotCity, a city-wide social context crowdsourcing platform that utilises user’s current location and geo-tagged social data (e.g., check-ins, “likes” and ratings) to autonomously obtain insight on a city’s tacit social awareness (e.g., “when is best time and where to go out on a Saturday night?”). HotCity is available as a mobile application for Android and as an interactive application on pervasive large displays, showcasing a heatmap of social buzz. We present the results of an in-the-field evaluation with 30 volunteers, of which 27 are tourists of the mobile app, compare it to a previous evaluation of the pervasive display app and also present usage data of free use of the pervasive display app over 3 years in the city of Oulu, Finland. Our data demonstrate that HotCity can communicate effectively the city’s current social buzz, without affecting digital maps’ cartography information. Our empirical analysis highlights a change in tourists’ foci when exploring the city using HotCity. We identify a transition from “individual [places]” to “good [areas]” and “people [choices]”. Our contributions are threefold: a long-term deployment of a city-wide social context crowdsourcing platform; an in-the-field evaluation of HotCity on mobile devices and pervasive displays; and an evaluation of cities’ tacit knowledge as social context as a denominator in city planning and for the development of future mobile social-aware applications.

Keywords: Mobile maps; Social networks; Urban context; City dynamics; Heatmaps; Data visualisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40558-017-0092-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:infott:v:17:y:2017:i:4:d:10.1007_s40558-017-0092-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ystems/journal/40558

DOI: 10.1007/s40558-017-0092-5

Access Statistics for this article

Information Technology & Tourism is currently edited by Zheng Xiang

More articles in Information Technology & Tourism from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().