Pedestrian Network Data Collection through Location-Based Social Networks Piyawan Kasemsuppakorn, Hassan A. Karimi Geoinformatics Laboratory, School ofInformation Sciences University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Email:
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[email protected] Abstract-The increasing capabilities of mobile devices and well developed and widely available for many countries in their mobile positioning technologies have shown great promise North America, Europe, and Asia. Data sources for road in location-enabled applications such as navigation systems. One network databases are provided by government agencies, e.g., of the essential components of a navigation system is a spatial the U.S. Census Bureau's Topographically Integrated database as it provides the base data to perform navigation and routing functions, among others. With the popularity of vehicle Geographic Encoding and Reference (TIGER), non-profit navigation systems, road network databases are now well organizations, e.g., Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access developed and well suited for vehicles traveling on roads. (PASDA), and commercial mapping companies, e.g., However, road networks are not suitable for pedestrian NAVTEQ. Currently, pedestrian navigation systems are based navigation systems as pedestrians do not walk along the middle on vehicle navigation systems at the data level [5] due to the of street lanes and are not constrained by the boundaries of the lack of availability of pedestrian network data. By "pedestrian road. Consequently, pedestrian network data is needed in location-enabled applications for pedestrians and other network" we mean spatial and non-spatial data for sidewalks, applications including transportation planning and physical crosswalks, footpaths, accessible entrances, pedestrian activities study. Due to the lack of availability of pedestrian underpasses, pedestrian overpasses, steps, and trails.