Empirical foundation of User Generated Content as input for policy making. Finding spatial patterns in Recreational Cycling

Abstract

The main subject of this thesis is the use of User Generated Content for scientific research. User Generated Content (UGC) is the collective name for all information that people share on the internet. When somebody shares a picture, a review or a location at a certain time, that person is creating UGC. UGC is an interesting phenomenon for geographical and spatial research for two main reasons. UGC is considered as big data, which means that many data is available and it often has a locational aspect due to the increase of location based social networking sites and applications, most of the time, the data is also free to gather online. This thesis shows how to fulfill the potential of UGC data based on a specific research topic; recreational cycling.