Assessing place type similarities based on functional signatures extracted from social media data

Abstract

Place types are often used to query places or retrieve data in gazetteers. Existing gazetteers do not use the same place type classification schemes, and the various typing schemes can cause difficulties in data alignment and matching. Different place types may share some level of similarities. However, previous studies have paid little attention to the place type similarities. This study proposes an analytical approach to measuring similarities between place types in multiple typing schemes based on functional signatures extracted from web-harvested place descriptions. In this study, a functional signature consists of three component signature factors: place affordance, events, and key-descriptors. The proposed approach has been tested in a case study using Twitter data. The case study finds high similarity scores between some pairs of types and summarizes the situations when high similarities could occur. The research makes two innovative contributions: First, it proposes a new analytical approach to measuring place type similarities. Second, it demonstrates the potential and benefits of using location-based social media data to better understand places.