Visit potential: A common vocabulary for the analysis of entity-location interactions in mobility applications

Abstract

A growing number of companies and public institutions use mobility data in their day-to-day business. One type of usage is the analysis of spatio-temporal interactions between mobile entities and geographic locations. In practice the employed measures depend on application demands and use context-specific terminology. Thus, a patchwork of measures has evolved which is not suitable for methodological research and interdisciplinary exchange of ideas. The measures lack a systematic formalization and a uniform terminology. In this paper we therefore systematically define measures for entity-location interactions which we name visit potential. We provide a common vocabulary that can be applied for an entire class of mobility applications. We present two real-world scenarios which apply entity-location interaction measures and demonstrate how the employed measures can be precisely defined in terms of visit potential. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.