Mobile Positioning Based Tourism Monitoring System: Positium Barometer

This paper introduces experiences with mobile positioning data in the web-based tourism management and monitoring system: “Positium Barometer”. 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. LBS (Location Based Services) 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. The biggest problem of mobile positioning is fear of surveillance.