What is Optimized Hot Spot Analysis

Spatial modeling always involves choices. The existence of constraints, the uncertainty and even the reliability of the data, the purposes and the applications of the studies make these reflections a kind of guiding compass for GIS analysts. Building on a previous exercise of data acquisition (check-ins) based on two digital social networks (DSN – Facebook and Foursquare) and on the awareness of the use of volunteered geographic information (VGI) generated by tourists through DSN, this work aims to evaluate the contribution of spatial analysis applied to urban tourism in the “Alta and University of Coimbra” area. Concepts and procedural tasks related to density determination, cluster analysis, and identification of patterns have thus been implemented with the purpose of evaluating and comparing the results obtained through the application of two techniques of spatial analysis, kernel density estimation (KDE) and optimized hot spot analysis (OHSA) and inverse distance weighting (IDW) interpolation.