FlowSampler: Visual Analysis of Urban Flows in Geolocated Social Media Data

FlowSampler is an interactive visual interface designed for spatial planners to gather, extract and analyse human flows in geolocated social media data that adopts a graph-based approach to infer movement pathways from spatial point type data and expresses the resulting information through multiple linked multiple visualisations to support data exploration.

Abstract

Analysis of flows such as human movement can help spatial planners better understand territorial patterns in urban environments. In this paper, we describe FlowSampler, an interactive visual interface designed for spatial planners to gather, extract and analyse human flows in geolocated social media data. Our system adopts a graph-based approach to infer movement pathways from spatial point type data and expresses the resulting information through multiple linked visualisations to support data exploration. We describe two use cases to demonstrate the functionality of our system and characterise how spatial planners utilise it to address analytical task.