Social and place-focused communities in location-based online social networks
Chlo\"e Brown, Vincenzo Nicosia, Salvatore Scellato, Anastasios, Noulas, Cecilia Mascolo

TL;DR
This study analyzes the structural differences between social and place-focused communities in location-based social networks, revealing distinct properties and the importance of place data for user-centric applications.
Contribution
It constructs and compares social and place-focused graphs, showing their structural differences and the limited overlap of communities, highlighting the significance of place data.
Findings
Social and place-focused graphs have different global and meso-scale structures.
Communities in social and place-focused graphs have negligible overlap.
Place-based group information is more useful for user applications than social communities.
Abstract
Thanks to widely available, cheap Internet access and the ubiquity of smartphones, millions of people around the world now use online location-based social networking services. Understanding the structural properties of these systems and their dependence upon users' habits and mobility has many potential applications, including resource recommendation and link prediction. Here, we construct and characterise social and place-focused graphs by using longitudinal information about declared social relationships and about users' visits to physical places collected from a popular online location-based social service. We show that although the social and place-focused graphs are constructed from the same data set, they have quite different structural properties. We find that the social and location-focused graphs have different global and meso-scale structure, and in particular that social and…
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