Constructing places from spatial footprints

Place is an essential concept in human discourse. It is people's interaction and experience with their surroundings that identify place from non-place in space. This paper explores the use of spatial footprints as a record of human interaction with the environment. Specifically, we use geotagged photos collected in Flickr to provide a collective view of sense of place, in terms of significance and location. Spatial footprints associated with photographs can not only describe individual place locations and spatial extents but also the relationship between places, such as hierarchy. This type of information about place may be utilized to study the way people understand their landscape, or can be incorporated into existing gazetteers for geographic information retrieval and location-based services. Other sources of user-generated geographic information, such as Foursquare and Twitter, may also be harvested and aggregated to study place in a similar way.