Web Data and Urban Space. Investigating Urban Leisure Activities using Web based Semantic Enrichment

Abstract

In this thesis ‘Urban Space and Web Data’ was aimed at testing a method to allow enrichment of urban leisure-related activities based on combining place information with web texts. The value of web data to grasp and enrich place representations has been widely recognised. It has been acknowledged as a relevant source as leisure seekers planning their visits to the city and share perceptions of their trips. Data is increasingly becoming a relevant source in understanding urban environments from a data-driven perspective. Nevertheless, most web data remains difficult to grasp when translating into a computational representation because it is unstructured data written in natural language. As leisure plays a bigger role in today’s urban economy, cities as Zwolle are aiming for being a vibrant and attractive city where citizens and visitors want to be. In doing so, it is their ambition to adopt more data-driven decision-making in order to know their guests better. This research shows the potential of topic modelling for urban policies but also discusses occurred implications to encourage further research.