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In-Depth Information
16.6 Conclusions
We have discussed mobility and geo-social networks, a very promising field
of research nowadays, in which wide and multidisciplinary studies have been
conducted in the last few years. We have seen how the interest in such top-
ics is widely motivated by the close relationships that may reside between the
social and mobility behavior of humans: people move, they move with friends or
relatives, they share experiences, they propagate information about new places
to friends, and so on. Moreover, in the last years, it is clear how this process,
supported by the large amount of online (geo)social networks and services, is
extensively conducted online, in near-real time, with a clear social and partici-
pative trend. These kinds of interactions and behaviors clearly produce massive
amounts of data about human actions, related to both social and mobility aspects,
and open the way for many interesting research challenges. However, despite
the large interest and the large amount of data produced, we have seen how
there is a clear disproportion between the results obtained so far and the vast
quantity and diversity of issues that are still open. We believe that the issues and
peculiarities related to the data (availability, privacy, granularity, and so on) and
the rapid explosion of the availability of new services and trends are two clear
reasons why it is still hard for the research in this direction to take off and to
produce large and strong analytical results. The preliminary work conducted by
many researchers so far is, however, very promising, and it seems clear that we
are facing the start of a new era in the research on society and individual human
behaviors.
16.7 Bibliographic Notes
In order to complete this chapter, we present some related work. We suggest to
read them to deeper understand some ongoing research in the field of geo-social
networks. Only the last three are related to trajectories; the others deal with
the geographic aspect of geo-social data. The work of
Warf and Sui
(
2010
), in
between geographic science and philosophy, mainly discusses how in practice
neogeographers use geo-spatial technologies inmultiple ways as opposite to con-
ventional GIS.
Craglia et al.
(
2012
) describe how the use of CGI contributes to
the vision of Digital Earth, extending the paradigm of spatial data infrastructures
by advocating an interactive and dynamic framework based on near-to-real-time
information from sensors and citizens. In
Chorley et al.
(
2011
), the authors,
analyzing a data set composed by check-in data from Foursquare, reveal some
individual characteristics of the cities. Cho et al. (2011) investigated the interac-
tion of a person's social network structure and his or her mobility using data sets
that capture human movements from Gowalla, Brightkite, and phone location
trace data. They tried to understand if friendships influence where people travel,
