Analyzing Human Activities Through Volunteered Geographic Information: Using Flickr to Analyze Spatial and Temporal Pattern of Tourist Accommodation Yeran Sun, Hongchao Fan, Marco Helbich and Alexander Zipf Abstract Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) provides valuable information to analyze human activities in space and time. In this chapter, we use Flickr photos as an example to explore the possibilities of VGI to analyze spatiotemporal patterns of tourists’ accommodation in Vienna, Austria as study site. Kernel density estimations and spatial scan statistics are used to explore the distribution of photos, while seasonality is considered additionally. The results show seasonal tendency of tourists for accommodation. It has been discovered that Flickr photos have, in general, the capability to improve tourism-related resear- ches. In particular, they are useful to investigate spatiotemporal human activities, which open new possibilities for further location and event based analysis. Keywords Volunteered geographic information  Flickr  Point pattern analysis  Spatial cluster detection  Tourist accommodation  Seasonality 1 Introduction Web 2.0 is a bi-directional collaboration allowing users to interact as well as share information and contact with other users (Goodchild 2007a). The shared geo- graphic information is called Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI; Good- child 2007a). It combines elements of Web 2.0 (Scharl and Tochtermann 2007), collective intelligence (Smith 1994), and neogeography (Turner 2006). Examples Y. Sun (&)  H. Fan  M. Helbich  A. Zipf Institute of Geography, University of Heidelberg, Berliner Straße 48,, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany e-mail: yeran.sun@geog.uni-heidelberg.de J. M. Krisp (ed.), Progress in Location-Based Services, Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-34203-5_4, Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 57