For many years now, ESILV research professors have focused on understanding and improving the tourism business through big data, primarily through the work being carried out by the De Vinci Research Center. In this context, the research paper “Indicators for Measuring Tourist Mobility”, co-authored by two professors and a student from ESILV, was presented at the WISE 2020 conference an A-level research event, which is the most prestigious classification in computer science research.
One of the significant areas of interest of the Digital Group of the De Vinci Research Center – DVRC is analyzing tourist behaviour using data from crowd-sourced review sites such as TripAdvisor.
The Pole Leonard de Vinci’s cross-disciplinary research centre includes all the researchers from the two schools of the Leonard De Vinci Association: the School of Management (EMLV) and the School of Engineering (ESILV).
Long-term partnerships around big data in tourism
This long-term project has been initiated within the framework of some collaborations developed by ESILV with various French cities to address the links between social networks, big data and tourism.
The most recent to date is the “Big Data & Tourism” project, an R&D partnership between the De Vinci Research Center and the European Metropolis of Lille (MEL).
The latest work, produced by Sonia Djebali and Nicolas Travers, research professors at ESILV, members of the Digital group at the De Vinci Research Center, and Nicolas Loas, student of 2021 class, was featured at the WISE 2020, 21th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering.
A well known international conference recognized as a top-level event in computer science
WISE – Intl Conf on Web Information Systems Engineering (since 2000) is a top conference in the field of Web and Information Systems.
In the research community, top conferences are known as selective and appreciated for their impact history and a rigorous review process. They are considered equivalent, if not superior in impact and prestige, to reputable journals.
For the first time in its 20 years history, the International Conference on Information Systems Engineering (WISE 2020) was held online.
The 2020 edition tackled seven themes: network embedding, graph neural network, social network, graph query, knowledge graph and entity linkage, Spatial Temporal Data Analysis, Service Computing and Cloud Computing.
« Indicators for Measuring Tourist Mobility »
According to the research paper‘s abstract, “digital traces left by active users on social networks have become a popular means of analyzing tourist behaviour. The large amount of data generated by tourists provides a key indicator for understanding their behaviour according to various criteria.
Analyses of tourists’ movement have a crucial role in tourism marketing to build tourist offices’ decision-making tools. Those actors have to face the need to discern tourists’ circulation, both quantitatively and qualitatively.”
In this paper, ESILV team proposes “a measure to capture tourist mobility on various areas which relies on a flow network of data from TripAdvisor into a Neo4j graph database. Thanks to this representation, we produce aggregated graphs at various scales and apply deep tourists’ analysis. One centrality aspect of graphs is used to propose a key indicator of tourists mobility.”
The payoff for an enriching studying experience at the De Vinci Research Center
Nicolas Loas, class of 2021, initiated this project as part of his research career at the De Vinci Research Center, during his fourth year of engineering studies.
“My role in the article consisted of two parts. Firstly, I wrote a “state of the art” summary. I had to find as much information as possible about the work that has already been done in the field, with a focus on graph analysis but also on the study of tourist behaviour.
The second part focused on experiments. This part consisted of carrying out the various calculations on our existing tourist data. “A very rigorous step, because we can never avoid making mistakes in the calculations and we are responsible for the validity of our results.
Co-authoring this paper for the WISE conference was the best experience in my research career, both on a personal and professional level.
It is also important to point out that the featuring of an article in a conference or a scientific journal is a recognition of our research work and therefore genuinely encouraging. I see it as a tribute to our contribution to the scientific community, ” says Nicolas, a Computer Science, Connected Objects and Security major student.
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