We have just published a paper from the EU Marie Curie International Training Network Geocrowd. The paper was lead by my PhD student Katarzyna Siła-Nowicka and prepared in collaboration with my St Andrews colleague Jed Long. It is a very interesting mix of computational movement analysis and social science, as it develops a data mining methodology that enables us to analyse commuting patterns but also identify the so-called “third places”. These places are defined as the spaces beyond main locations (home/work) where individuals spend time to socialise. The existence of these places was theorised in sociology several decades ago, but this is the first time that they have been identified from real movement data, which is very exciting. In the paper we identify  these places from volunteered GPS trajectories linked to data describing contextual geographic information and investigate their spatial and temporal use:

Siła-Nowicka K, Vandrol J, Oshan T, Long J, Demšar U and Fotheringham S, 2015, Analysis of Human Mobility from Volunteered Movement Data and Contextual Information. International Journal of Geographic Information Science, Advanced Online Publication. DOI: 10.1080/13658816.2015.1100731

There will also be a free data set of volunteered GPS trajectories linked to this paper available soon. Stay tuned.