VisTravel: visualizing tourism network opinion from the user generated content

With the development of Internet, an increasing number of people choose to travel during the holidays and post travel information on the tourism products and services through the smart devices anytime and anywhere. Because tourism network opinions have a significant impact on tourism activities and the whole tourist trade, they have attracted the attention of tourism management department. Through analyzing the tourism User-Generated Content data obtained from Mafengwo, which is one of the influential tourism social networking sites, this paper studies and designs a visual analytic system—for tourism network opinion—VisTravel. The VisTravel system includes three main views: the interactive filtering view can select travel notes and comments, the content view is used to express comments and tourists’ emotion changes, and the pop-up information view shows social relationships of tourist and tag cloud of comments. In this paper, tourists’ hierarchical structure is put forward to explore the tourist’s social networking relationships, and the stacked group is used to analyze tourists’ sentiment changes. Experimental results show that the proposed VisTravel system can effectively analyze tourists’ regional tendency and emotional changes. It can also help the tourism management department more thoroughly understand the tourism network opinion in time.

A screenshot of VisTravel. The system includes eight views. (a Temporal histogram, filtering subset of travel notes. b Map notes view, filtering subset of travel comments. c Travel notes view, selecting one of subset of travel notes. d Sentiment analyzer view, indicating the changes of tourists’ sentiment. e Comment list view, displaying the raw comment data. f Hierarchical structure view, showing tourists’ geographical relationships in comments. g Tag cloud, showing key words of the comments.)