A Temporal Approach to Defining Place Types based on User-Contributed Geosocial Content

Place is one of the foundational concepts on which the field of Geography has been built. Traditionally, GIScience research into place has been approached from a spatial perspective. While space is an integral feature of place, it represents only a single dimension (or a combination of three dimensions to be exact), in the complex, multidimensional concept that is place. Though existing research has shown that both spatial and thematic dimensions are valuable, time has historically been under-utilized in its ability to describe and define places and their types. The recent availability and access to user-generated geosocial content has allowed for a much deeper investigation of the temporal dimension of place. Multi-resolution temporal signatures are constructed based on these data permitting both place instances and place types to be compared through a robust set of (dis)similarity measures. The primary contribution of this work lies in demonstrating how places are defined through a better understanding of temporal user behavior. Furthermore, the results of this research present the argument that the temporal dimension is the most indicative placial dimension for classifying places by type