A study of the temporal-spatial behavior of tourists based on georeferenced photos.

With the popularity of portable consumer electronics( e. g. digital camera,mobile phone,portable computer) and the development of network technology,plenty of freely accessible georeferenced photos are generated by the public on the internet,providing lots of data resources to study human temporal-spatial behavior. In this paper,we retrieved 2,272 photos from Panoramio,which had been taken in Gulangyu by 447 tourists over a period of 10 years,and introduced a georeferenced photo method to analyze the temporal-spatial behavior of tourists including tourist temporal variation( daily,weekly and monthly),duration of stay,daily average number of tourists,tourist flow maps and potential tourist hotspots. Comparing the results of this method with those reported by former researchers and the data released by the media,the following conclusions were drawn. 1. The results show that georeferenced photo method can analyze effectively the temporal-spatial behavior of tourists and has advantages in collecting data,analyzing tourist flow maps and potential hotspots with the help of GIS tools,especially in larger tourism areas. Compared to georeferenced photo method,the traditional methods such as questionnaire surveys,GPS positioning,mobile positioning etc need lots of volunteers,which increases the cost and time of research. 2. Different methods can complement each other. The georeferenced photo method also has some limits,for example,1) people who upload their photos may not represent all types of visitors; 2) fewer photos are taken at night which do not properly reflect the temporal-spatial behavior during the night; 3) the possibility that time stamps extracted from the camera-generated EXIF metadata may not match the actual time the photo was taken; 4) the possibility that the stated location of the photo might not be correct and the demographic information such as age,gender and nationality cannot be obtained from that. While,the questionnaire survey can provide the demographic information,GPS positioning and mobile positioning can provide more accuratly locations and time. 3. "Public-Consumer electronics-Network "can be shape to an ideal research platform. In recent years, portable consumer electronics have spread widely and these devices have more powerful ability( faster processor, larger memory space,internet accessible,etc) to deal with more complex tasks. People use these devices to record information every day. In the process,their own behavior is simultaneously recorded in these devices. Meanwhile, with the popularity of the internet and the emergence of information-sharing internet communities,many people like to share their information with others and make it freely accessible on the internet,which provides a wealth of data to study the temporal-spatial distribution of humans. Such analysis will be helpful to tourism resource management.