Measuring Geospatial Properties : Relating Online Content Browsing Behaviors to Users’ Points of Interest

• With the growth of the Mobile Internet, people have become active in both the online and offline worlds. Investigating the relationships between users’ online and offline behaviors is critical for personalization and content caching, as well as improving urban planning. Although some studies have measured the spatial properties of online social relationships, there have been few in-depth investigations of the relationships between users’ online content browsing behaviors and their real-life locations. This paper provides the first insight into the geospatial properties of online content browsing behaviors from the perspectives of both geographical regions and individual users. We first analyze the online browsing patterns across geographical regions. Then, a multilayer-network-based model is presented to discover how inter-user distances affect the distributions of users with similar online browsing interests. Drawing upon results from a comprehensive study of users of three popular online content services in a metropolitan city in China, we achieve a broad understanding of the general and specific geospatial properties of users’ various preferences. Specifically, users with similar online browsing interests exhibit, to a large extent, strong geographic correlations, and different services exhibit distinct geospatial properties in terms of their usage patterns. The results of this work can potentially be exploited to improve a vast number of applications. 

Keyword

Geospatial properties

Multilayer network

Online content browsing

Online content services

Multilayers

Different services

Geo-spatial

Metropolitan cities

Multi-layer network

On-line contents

Points of interest

Social relationships

Spatial properties

Geographical regions

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)