Studying Human Mobility through Photograph Geo-Tagging Research Paper

Studying Human Mobility through Photograph Geo-Tagging - Research Paper Example With 24 satellites and aided with two carrier signals, it can transmit signals accurately. However, to operate within buildings, it requires at least 4 of its satellites to have clear access to that specified area (Djuknic, & Richton, 2001). To overcome such a difficulty, assisted-GPS technology has come into limelight. It provides more accurate detail even from within buildings and also associated with it is a superior quality (Djuknic, & Richton, 2001). Georeferencing is one of the developing technologies, especially geotagging. An analysis on the research related to this field focuses on four major points: 1. Organization of georeferenced media sources 2. Data mining of organized knowledge 3. Identifying the world’s landmarks and 4. Identification of the photo location, geographically(Zheng et. al, 2011) The organized knowledge used for online data mining has two parts. 1. The knowledge stored in database is actually a collection of data provided by the society itself, obta ined from several social websites. 2. The stored knowledge and corresponding mining provides multi-modal information about the stored data. (Zheng et. al, 2011) There are several methods that are used as sources for collecting information that is geotagged. Collective geotagging is one of the important methods where publicly available information uploaded by the users are geotagged and collected. Here the term, â€Å"geotagged† means that some kind of location metadata is added to the object, say a photo. Some of the important information stored in the metadata includes latitude information and place names. This process can be done either by hardware method or software method. Hardware geotagging is done through the installed cameras in mobile phones which on clicking of a photo add that information to the picture. In terms of software, which is the most prevalent method of geotagging, several photo sharing sites like Flickr and Picasso add such information through map tools. Although they are less in accuracy, the provide results with maximum relevance. (Zheng et. al, 2011) Sharing of images in online communities is an upward trend. Especially for people who post their travelogues in blogs and communities with lots of pictures of their trip. Hao. Et. al (2009) created a process which picks up the keywords from the description, identifies the pictures associated with those words and prepared a document with the results of those pictures to create an automated travelogue. Georeferencing has improved on the above process by one step and provides a more coherent result. With many people uploading photos in public and social sites, travel and tracking human mobility has been given a fresh look. Human mobility Georeferencing is considered to be the best thing to have happened for people involved in human mobility studies and for tourists. (Girardian & Blat, 2008) conducted a research to indicate that the pictures and other such information presented by the p eople voluntarily can be used to identify human mobility, especially that of tourists. The first step in understanding the mobility of humans by the authors was to make use of the large amount of data available in the online community. After conducting detailed studies in several tourist parts like Rome, Barcelona and Italy, they were able to collect detailed information about urban tourism. (Girardian & Blat, 2008) The figure shown below shows heat maps which indicate the presence of tourists in Italy along with their