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Towards Developing Smart Cities: Evidence from GIS Analysis on Tourists’ Behavior Using Social Network Data in the City of Athens

  • Athanasios KoutrasEmail author
  • Ioannis A. Nikas
  • Alkiviadis Panagopoulos
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics book series (SPBE)

Abstract

The evolution of web along with the technological explosion in web technologies and social networks has made internet a “place” where someone can post his/her tourist digitalized experiences easily, while these are made available and accessed worldwide almost instantly. In addition, such information is usually associated with features related to users’ location and temporal position. This rapid development gives the motive for the creation of smart cities and corresponding smart tourism ecosystems. In this work, a density-based spatial clustering method is applied on posts from photo-sharing social media, to analyze geo-tagged data emanating from an urban area. The aim of this research is mainly to reveal the most important spots in well-known landmarks inside an urban area, and explore the visiting tendencies of tourists of these spots. The proposed method was applied on the city of Athens, and our results are presented using data from the Flickr photo-sharing web service.

Keywords

Smart tourism Social media analytics Spatial-temporal analysis Cluster analysis 

JEL Classification

C38 C55 L83 Z32 
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Copyright information

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  • Athanasios Koutras
    • 1
    Email author
  • Ioannis A. Nikas
    • 2
  • Alkiviadis Panagopoulos
    • 2
  1. 1.Department of Informatics and Mass MediaTechnical Educational Institute of Western GreecePatraGreece
  2. 2.Department of Tourism ManagementTechnical Educational Institute of Western GreecePatraGreece

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