Semantic Trails of City Explorations: How Do We Live a City

TL;DR

This paper defines semantic city exploration trails, creates datasets of such trails by integrating multiple data sources, and demonstrates their use in a tourist recommender system.

Contribution

It introduces a novel concept of semantic trails, provides publicly available datasets, and applies them in a city exploration recommender system.

Findings

Two large datasets of semantic trails released publicly

Semantic trails effectively represent individual city exploration behaviors

Recommender system successfully guides tourists using semantic trail data

Abstract

The knowledge of city exploration trails of people is in short supply because of the complexity in defining meaningful trails representative of individual behaviours and in the access to actionable data. Existing datasets have only recorded isolated check-ins of activities featured by opaque venue types. In this paper, we fill the gaps in defining what is a semantic trail of city exploration and how it can be generated by integrating different data sources. Furthermore, we publicly release two datasets holding millions of semantic trails each and we discuss their most salient characteristics. We finally present an application using these datasets to build a recommender system meant to guide tourists while exploring a city.