Utilizing User Generated Contents to describe Tourism Areas of Interest

The use of available place databases (like GeoNamesand traditional maps) to obtain descriptive keywords of a user defined place is not possible because such data sources mainlymaintain location definitions of the well-known places only.Traditional sources may not be updated dynamically and maynot ensure diverse information. Additionally, they do not give anyinformation on the popularity, e.g., which is more popular amongthe places indexed by the same keyword. A bottom-up approach,based on real user attention, can address these problems. Wepropose a method to describe tourism area of interest (TAOI) byaggregating user generated social media text. We match the cooccurrence of important keywords in a particular location andselect such words to describe TAOIs. We applied the proposedmethod to data on micro blogging service Twitter and photosharing service Flickr and confirmed that our method made itpossible to extract TAOI description. The recommended bottomup approach enables the extraction of valuable information thatis not possible by using traditional top-down approaches.