From stay to play – A travel planning tool based on crowdsourcing user-generated contents

Conventional ways of trip planning using online reviews from multiple sources are often cumbersome and uncustomizable. The advance in information and communication technology (ICT) and the surge in user-generated contents (UGC) provide great opportunities to facilitate trip planning. This paper proposes a travel-planning tool by crowdsourcing multiple UGCs to provide customized information for tourists. We harvested hotel customer reviews from TripAdvisor, photo information from Flickr, and travel costs between destinations from Uber. First, we used geospatial data mining approaches to extract tourism attractions information from Flickr; identified multi-facet characteristics of hotels with natural language processing (NLP); and provided travel route recommendations with graph analysis. Second, we developed a web-based interface to let users communicate with the system interactively, which provides integrated recommendations including attractions, hotels, and visit route sequences. Two cities in the United States (i.e. Atlanta and Chicago) were used as cases to illustrate our approaches. The proposed travel planning tool is not only beneficial to support customized travel decision-making, but also supportive for hotel managers with strategic management implications.     

Difference of urban development in China from the perspective of passenger transport around Spring Festival

Because cities have different attractions for laborers, people migrate from city to city, which may widen the gap between cities. Analyzing the fluxes and directions of migrant flows can help us clarify the regional difference of urban development. Using migration data inferred from passenger travels during 2016 Spring Festival from Tencent Location Big Data, this paper analyzed the unbalanced migration between cities and the spatial difference of urban development. Network analysis methods are employed to evaluate interactions among cities. A community detection method identifies 19 city communities, and the directions of migrant flows in the communities are explored. The PageRank algorithm is employed to evaluate the importance of cities on the migration network and divide the cities into 5 grades, and then the hierarchical structure of the migrant network is illustrated and analyzed. Indices based on migrant populations indicate that the most attractive cities for laborers are along the east coast and that cities in the central region export a significant number of laborers. PageRank and attractiveness values are compare with socio-economic data, and the results indicate that both PageRank and attractiveness are positively correlated with the economic and development level of cities, while PageRank works better. It suggests that Spring Festival travel data in China can be used as migration data, however, it should be facilitated with network methods to disclose the relationship between Spring Festival travel and urban development.     

Open innovation and its discontents

This paper critically synthesizes empirics and issues in discrete inter-disciplinary literatures to identify ‘open innovation’ as part of an emergent regime of accumulation, overlaying and co-existing with flexible production, and encompassing novel firm-level strategies, new forms of corporate networks, and a disturbing capital-labor relation that informalizes innovative work while cultivating entrepreneurial but self-exploiting subjects. I explain the novelty of open innovation, its genealogy, and the implications for people and conditions of work as much as for firms in a new topology of power relations. I cast the ensemble of strategies and tactics encompassed in open innovation as contingent, continually unfolding, and sometimes chaotic if not destructive for both firms and labor, in contrast to the celebratory tone in the business as well as geography and regional studies literatures regarding its benefits for competitiveness, innovativeness, value capture, and development. Open innovation – the externalization of innovation – entails long-run approaches to innovation and investment that are fraught with problems, prompting the development of short-term tactics to engage the challenges. One short-run strategy, crowdsourcing, bypasses the conventional web of inter-firm relations to connect digitally with individuals of the global crowd, enabling firms to reap the benefits of the crowd’s innovative talents, often without remuneration under circumstances that institutionalize informal work. These neoliberal subjects are best understood in terms of multiple subjectivities. I close by connecting the crowdsourcing of innovative with non-innovative work, both of which are parts of the emergent regime associated with new hiring and work practices that usher in new modes of exploitation.     

兼容VGI与众包的灾害信息管理系统研究

针对地理信息采集VGI和众包传播模式在灾害救援中发挥的巨大作用,设计并实现了兼容VGI与众包的灾害信息管理系统VDMS,实例验证了该系统的有效性。结果表明:VDMS系统可以将VGI众包采集流程集成到灾害信息管理中,提高了灾害信息采集效率。设计了一种灾害信息管理系统VDMS,实现了灾害发生时海量数据的高效管理与有效利用。     

Crowdsourced Delphis: Designing solutions to complex environmental problems with broad stakeholder participation

There is a well-established need for increased stakeholder participation in the generation of adaptive management approaches and specific solutions to complex environmental problems. However, integrating participant feedback into current science, research, and decision-making processes is challenging. This paper presents a novel approach that marries a rigorous Delphi method, borrowed from policy and organizational sciences, with contemporary “crowdsourcing” to address the complex problems of water pollution exacerbated by climate change in the Lake Champlain Basin. In an online Delphi forum that occurred over a six-week period during the Spring of 2014, fifty-three participants proposed and commented on adaptive solutions to address water quality in the context of climate change. In a follow up Multi-Stakeholder workshop, thirty-eight stakeholders participated in refining and synthesizing the results from the forum. To inform modeling and policy dialogue, the resulting list of interventions was analyzed by time horizon, domain, type of adaptation action, and priority level. The interventions suggested by stakeholders within the crowdsourcing forum have contributed to the current policy dialogue in Vermont including legislation to address phosphorus loading to Lake Champlain. This stakeholder approach strengthens traditional modeling scenario development to include solutions and priorities that have been collectively refined and vetted.     

Geo-reCAPTCHA: Crowdsourcing large amounts of geographic information from earth observation data

The reCAPTCHA concept provides a large amount of valuable information for various applications. First, it provides security, e.g., for a form on a website, by means of a test that only a human could solve. Second, the effort of the user for this test is used to generate additional information, e.g., digitization of books or identification of house numbers. In this work, we present a concept for adapting the reCAPTCHA idea to create user-generated geographic information from earth observation data, and the requirements during the conception and implementation are depicted in detail. Furthermore, the essential parts of a Geo-reCAPTCHA system are described, and afterwards transferred, to a prototype implementation. An empirical user study is conducted to investigate the Geo-reCAPTCHA approach, assessing time and quality of the resulting geographic information. Our results show that a Geo-reCAPTCHA can be solved by the users of our study on building digitization in a short amount of time (19.2 s on average) with an overall average accuracy of the digitizations of 82.2%. In conclusion, Geo-reCAPTCHA has the potential to be a reasonable alternative to the typical reCAPTCHA, and to become a new data-rich channel of crowdsourced geographic information.     

Crowdsourcing geospatial data

In this paper we review recent developments of crowdsourcing geospatial data. While traditional mapping is nearly exclusively coordinated and often also carried out by large organisations, crowdsourcing geospatial data refers to generating a map using informal social networks and web 2.0 technology. Key differences are the fact that users lacking formal training in map making create the geospatial data themselves rather than relying on professional services; that potentially very large user groups collaborate voluntarily and often without financial compensation with the result that at a very low monetary cost open datasets become available and that mapping and change detection occur in real time. This situation is similar to that found in the Open Source software environment.We shortly explain the basic technology needed for crowdsourcing geospatial data, discuss the underlying concepts including quality issues and give some examples for this novel way of generating geospatial data. We also point at applications where alternatives do not exist such as life traffic information systems. Finally we explore the future of crowdsourcing geospatial data and give some concluding remarks.     

Geometric quality assessment of trajectory‐generated VGI road networks based on the symmetric arc similarity

As large amounts of trajectories from a wide variety of Volunteered Geographic Information (referred to as VGI) contributors pour into the spatial database, the geometric qualities of the VGI road networks generated from these trajectories are different from the ground truth road dataset and so need to be differently assessed. To address this issue, an assessment approach based on symmetric arc similarity is proposed, and the geometric quality of a VGI road network is assessed by its conformity with the corresponding ground truth road network, the results being visualized as hierarchical thematic maps. To compute the conformity, the geometric similarity between the VGI road arc and the corresponding ground truth road arc, which is selected by the adaptive searching distance, is measured based on the symmetric arc similarity method; the geometric quality is assessed based on an assessment matrix. Also, the symmetric arc similarity method is independent of directions and with a feature of shift‐independence, which is applicable to assess the geometric qualities of different VGI road networks and makes the assessment result consistent with the actual situation of the real world. The robustness and scalability of the approach are examined using VGI road networks from different sources.