Analyzing Geo-Spatial Trails: Visualizing and
       Comparing Movement Hypotheses

             Martin Becker1 , Philipp Singer2 Florian Lemmerich2 ,
           Andreas Hotho1,3 , Denis Helic4 , and Markus Strohmaier2,5
                         1
                         University of Würzburg, Germany
                {becker,hotho}@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de
                          2
                             GESIS, Cologne, Germany
      {philipp.singer,florian.lemmerich,markus.strohmaier}@gesis.org
                   3
                     L3S Research Center, Hannover, Germany
               {philipp.singer,markus.strohmaier}@gesis.org
                 4
                    Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria
                                dhelic@tugraz.at
               5
                  University of Koblenz-Landau, Mainz, Germany


       Abstract. Understanding the way people move through urban areas
       is an important problem that has implications for a range of societal
       challenges such as city planning, public transportation, or crime anal-
       ysis. We present a visualization tool called VizTrails for exploring and
       understanding such human movement [2]. For the explored movement,
       we utilize the Bayesian approach HypTrails to formulate and compare
       different hypotheses explaining the underlying processes [1].
       VizTrails features aggregated statistics of trails for geographic areas on a
       map, e.g., the number of users passing through or the locations commonly
       visited next. Amongst other tools, VizTrails also allows to visualize the
       results of SPARQL queries in order to relate the observed statistics with
       its geo-spatial context, e.g., considering a city’s points of interest.
       The insights from exploring the corresponding trajectories and features
       can be directly applied to modelling hypotheses about how the observed
       patterns can be explained. Then, the Bayesian approach HypTrails allows
       to compare the plausibility of such hypotheses with each other.


References
1. Becker, M., Singer, P., Lemmerich, F., Hotho, A., Helic, D., Strohmaier, M.: Pho-
   towalking the city: Comparing hypotheses about urban photo trails on flickr,
   http://dmir.org/pub/2015/photowalking-socinfo.pdf, under review
2. Becker, M., Singer, P., Lemmerich, F., Hotho, A., Helic, D., Strohmaier, M.: Viz-
   trails: An information visualization tool for exploring geographic movement trajec-
   tories. In: Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media.
   pp. 319–320. HT ’15, ACM, New York, NY, USA (2015)

  Copyright c 2015 by the papers authors. Copying permitted only for private and
  academic purposes. In: R. Bergmann, S. Görg, G. Müller (Eds.): Proceedings of
  the LWA 2015 Workshops: KDML, FGWM, IR, and FGDB. Trier, Germany, 7.-9.
  October 2015, published at http://ceur-ws.org




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