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More than 10 years have passed since the coining of the term volunteered geographic information (VGI) in 2007. This article presents the results of a review of the literature concerning VGI. A total of 346 articles published in 24 international refereed journals in GIScience between 2007 and 2017 have been reviewed. The review has uncovered varying levels of popularity of VGI research over space and time, and varying interests in various sources of VGI (e.g. OpenStreetMap) and VGI-related terms (e.g. user-generated content) that point to the multi-perspective nature of VGI. Content-wise, using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), this study has extracted 50 specific research topics pertinent to VGI. The 50 topics have been subsequently clustered into 13 intermediate topics and three overarching themes to allow a hierarchical topic review. The overarching VGI research themes include (1) VGI contributions and contributors, (2) main fields applying VGI, and (3) conceptions and envisions. The review of the articles under the three themes has revealed the progress and the points that demand attention regarding the individual topics. This article also discusses the areas that the existing research has not yet adequately explored and proposes an agenda for potential future research endeavors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modeling the geographic distribution of tourists at a tourist destination is crucial when it comes to enhancing the destination’s resilience to disasters and crises, as it enables the efficient allocation of limited resources to precise geographic locations. Seldom have existing studies explored the geographic distribution of tourists through understanding the mechanisms behind it. This article proposes to couple maximum entropy modeling with geotagged social media data to determine the geographic distribution of tourists in order to facilitate disaster and crisis management at tourist destinations. As one of the most popular tourist destinations in the United States, San Diego was chosen as the study area to demonstrate the proposed approach. We modeled the tourist geographic distribution in the study area by quantifying the relationship between the distribution and five environmental factors, including land use, land parcel, elevation, distance to the nearest major road and distance to the nearest transit stop. The geographic distribution’s dependency on and sensitivity to the environmental factors were uncovered. The model was subsequently applied to estimate the potential impacts of one simulated tsunami disaster and one simulated traffic breakdown due to crisis events such as a political protest or a fire hazard. As such, the effectiveness of the approach has been demonstrated with specific disaster and crisis scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geotagged photos on social media like Flickr explicitly indicate the trajectories of tourists. They can be employed to reveal the tourists’ preference on landmarks and routings of tourism. Most of existing works on routing searches are based on the trajectories of GPS-enabled devices’ users. From a distinct point of view, we attempt to propose a novel approach in which the basic unit of routing is separate road segment instead of GPS trajectory segment. In this paper, we build a recommendation system that provides users with the most popular landmarks as well as the best travel routings between the landmarks. By using Flickr geotaggged photos, the top ranking travel destinations in a city can be identified and then the best travel routes between the popular travel destinations are recommended. We apply a spatial clustering method to identify the main travel landmarks and subsequently rank these landmarks. Using machine learning method, we calculate the tourism popularity of the road in terms of relevant parameters, e.g., the number of users and the number of Point-of-Interests. These popularity assessments are integrated into the routing recommendation system. The routing recommendation system takes into consideration both the popularity assessment and the length of the road. The best route recommended to the user minimizes the distance while including maximal tourism popularity. Experiments were conducted in two different scenarios. The empirical results show that the recommendation system is able to provide the user good travel planning including both top ranking landmarks and suitable routings in a city. Besides, the system offers user-generated semantic information for the recommended routes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]