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

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.