Investigating Road-Constrained Spatial Distributions and Semantic Attractiveness for Area of Interest

Hongtao Ma, Yuan Meng, Hanfa Xing and Cansong Li
Additional contact information
Hongtao Ma: School of Tourism and Geography Science, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming 650500, China
Yuan Meng: College of Geography and Environment, Shandong Normal University, Jinan 250300, Shandong, China
Hanfa Xing: College of Geography and Environment, Shandong Normal University, Jinan 250300, Shandong, China
Cansong Li: School of Tourism and Geography Science, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming 650500, China

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 17, 1-15

Abstract: An area of interest (AOI) refers to an urban area that attracts people’s attention within different urban functions through cities. The wide availability of big geo-data that are able to capture human activities and environmental socioeconomics enable a more nuanced identification of AOIs. Current research has proposed various approaches to delineate continuous AOI patterns using big geo-data. However, these approaches ignore the effects of urban structures such as road networks on reshaping AOIs, and fail to investigate the attractiveness and certain functions within AOIs. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a systematic framework to investigate the spatial distribution of road-constrained AOIs and analyze the semantic attractiveness. First, we propose an Epanechnikov-based kernel density estimation (KDE) with a bandwidth selection strategy to extract road-constrained AOIs. Then, we establish semantic attractiveness indices regarding AOIs based on the textual information and the number of review data. Finally, we investigate in detail the spatial distribution and semantic attractiveness of AOIs in Yuexiu, Guangzhou. The results show that road-constrained AOIs can not only effectively capture the human activity patterns influenced by urban structures, but also depict certain urban functions including entertainment, public, service, hotel, education, and food functions. This method provides a quantitative reference to monitor urban structures and human activities to support city planning.

Keywords: area of interest; road-constrained; semantic attractiveness; review data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/17/4624/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/17/4624/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:17:p:4624-:d:260906

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().