Exploring the potential of geotagged social media data for Geo-spatial analysis: a case study of tourist spatial behavior in Uganda.

Abstract

Capturing and analyzing tourist spatial behavior has been essential for effective planning and management of the tourism sector in Uganda. This has provided much needed information about the various spatial aspects of tourists including destinations they visit and how they move between the different destinations across the country. Currently, information about tourists is collected using conventional methods like interviews and questionnaire. However, such methods provide data which is often scarce, imprecise and out of date limiting on the effectiveness of decisions made by the government because of the inadequate data analysed. Although this is tehj case, social media services are now a source of geotagged data which can be used for such studies so as to overcome som eof the data challenges mentioned above. This research uses geotagged social media data from three services i.e. Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare to analyze the distribution of tourists together with their mobility patterns across the country. The researcher also makes comparisons between the tourists statistics collected from geo-tagged social media data with the already existing statistics collected using the conventional methods.