Positium Barometer: Mobile positioning based tourism monitoring system

Authors:
Rein Ahas (University of Tartu, Estonia)
Margus Tiru (Positium LBS, Estonia)

Abstract:
The 21st century started with a growth in the spatial mobility of people, goods and information. This has created a demand for new data sources. Mobile positioning is becoming an attractive source for measuring the spatial mobility of people. Digital movement tracks recorded by mobile positioning ("virtual air") have many advantages as the penetration of phones is high and the precision of mobile positioning is improving.
This paper introduces experiences with passive mobile positioning data in the tourism studies in Estonia. There has been developed tourism management and monitoring system "Positium Barometer" by Positium LBS and Department of Geography, University of Tartu. The system has been developed for tourism enterprises, public authorities, scientists and planners to obtain statistical overviews and standardized analyses about the space-time movement of tourists. Positium Barometer uses passive mobile positioning data & location data that is stored automatically in the memory files (billing memory, hand-over logs etc) of mobile operators. Our database consists of records of the locations of roaming call activities in Estonia. Data is stored for every call activity of a foreign phone in Estonia. The data is anonymous, phone numbers and user data are not identified by mobile operators. Data is a new and promising source for studying the geography of tourism and space-time behaviour since the data is spatially more precise than questionnaires or accommodation statistics.

Our experiences with mobile positioning show that it opens some new perspectives for studying human activities and monitoring city life. Positioning becomes more feasible for developing "location aware" participatory tools, questionnaires and real time applications.
Mobile positioning has many problematic aspects such as privacy and surveillance as well as problems with sampling and access to data. Issues of spatial privacy related to mobile positioning are opening a new topic in geographical debates know also as "geoslavery". Another problem with mobile positioning applications is that since mobile positioning based experiments and surveys today have mainly been developed by GIS and IT specialists, they often remain on the "playing with moving dots" level, without addressing the deeper issues. Without the theoretical and methodological input of social scientists, these experiments remain rather primitive.

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