MyTrace: A Mobile Phone-Based Tourist Spatial-Temporal Behavior Record and Analysis System

Motivated by the needs of personalized travel position logging and interest recommendation, an open research-oriented system to collect and analyze tourist spatial-temporal behavior has been developed. In this paper, we introduce the architecture and internal structure of the system, which not only provides a communication platform to tourists, but also as a medium of data collection for related researchers and administrators. The system includes three key components: mobile phone application, data receiver, and data management and analysis platform. An application user can record his travel traces with interesting activity points in map, which are consist of pictures, videos, user’s feelings, comments, and companions, etc., and can be shared in his social network. Uploaded position logs and activity points of users can be used to analyze the characteristics of spatial-temporal behavior by researchers and administrators and infer the interesting insights that are useful in tourist behavior research and tourist attraction planning. Main functions of each component and key techniques inside the system are described briefly. The system has been tested openly since April, 2016 and promoted in two tourist destinations in July, 2016. Consequently, an available dataset including 188,944 GPS locations, 285 activity points and 251 questionnaire responses from 659 registered users is constructed. The initial experiment results show the system is effective and worth promoting. We hope that more users not only tourists and researchers join this research system.