Potential of Twitter Data in Spatio-Temporal Analysis

The main purpose of this study is to explore the potential of social media geotagged data for better understanding activities taking place in a city.
The explorative spatial and temporal analysis is applied to geotagged Twitter data for a chosen area in order to:

• Learn about temporal patterns for different activity groups
• Find locations of universities, restaurants or parks from tweets, without knowing the city
• Examine differences between tourists’ and local inhabitant’s activity
• Define a relationship between temporal and spatial aspects for a chosen activity group.

The interactive web-based tool, next to Spatio-temporal study, allows everyone to explore the dataset, compare results for different activity groups, and even read every tweet used in the analysis. At any time user can easily modify displayed information by changing location, time period or activity group. The tool allows also to display other information about the area e.g. land use, public transport, greenery.