Mapping a City’s Activity. A Project of Volunteered Geographic Information Using Mobile Mapping Collection

The work done deals with the concept of Volunteered Geographic Information and is based on the use of a mobile mapping collection tool to retrieve geographical data from an urban fieldwork. The research has been carried on during the academic year 2014/2015, involving students from the course of Geography of Networks within the post graduate degrees in ‘Economics’ and ‘Business’ of the University of Trieste (Italy). The intent was testing the potential of crowdsourcing in retrieving data using a bottom up approach, relying on a set of trained and aware ‘urban sensors’ as data collectors. This allowed us to derive first-hand geographical data concerning a particular topic and analyze its spatial distribution by means of Geographical Information Systems and spatial analytical tools. The topic studied was represented by the urban ‘movida’, the analysis of the areas of the city that are more or less active during the days and during the week. This major aim was also coupled with an ancillary one, as the coverage of Wi-Fi hotspots and networks over the urban area of Trieste. It is known that many Italian cities still do not allow a very wide coverage of wireless networks to access the Internet. The city of Trieste, on the border between Italy and Slovenia, is suited with a certain degree of coverage, particularly in main roads and squares, thanks to free Wi-Fi coverage managed by the municipality and an academic network of Eduroam system, quite spread over European and world cities hosting universities and research centers.