Bubble

World Wide Web

Biology

Identification (biology)

Metropolitan area

Tourism

Archaeology

Telecommunications

Parallel computing

Computer science

Botany

Maximum bubble pressure method

Interface (matter)

Geography

Data science

Artificial intelligence

Cluster analysis

Location-based service

Information retrieval

Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN) present so far the most vivid realization of the convergence of the physical and virtual social planes. In this work we propose a novel approach on modeling human activity and geographical areas by means of place categories. We apply a spectral clustering algorithm on areas and users of two metropolitan cities on a dataset sourced from the most vibrant LBSN, Foursquare. Our methodology allows the identification of user communities that visit similar categories of places and the comparison of urban neighborhoods within and across cities. We demonstrate how semantic information attached to places could be plausibly used as a modeling interface for applications such as recommender systems and digital tourist guides.

Exploiting Semantic Annotations for Clustering Geographic Areas and Users in Location-based Social Networks