A Conceptual Framework for Representation of Location-based Social Media Activities (Short Paper)

This research develops a conceptual framework for the representation and analysis of location-based social media activities (LBSMA) in GIS. With increasing popularity of location-based social networking, social media platforms have become new channels to observe human activities in physical and virtual worlds. At the same time, there is a shift of some human interactions from the physical space to the virtual social space. Traditional geographical representation in GIS is not sufficient to handle the increased sophistication of human activities related to, or embedded in, location-based social media data. This research proposes an ontology for the location-based social media activity data and a conceptual framework for them to be modeled in a GIS environment so that interconnections of human activities in spatial-temporal-social dimensions can be represented, organized, retrieved, analyzed, and visualized in the system.