Modeling Routes of Trail Users with Textual Descriptions

Analyzing visitor flows in natural or touristic areas is key for assessing users’ preferences and behaviour, and for providing relevant input for infrastructure development and visitor management measures. Despite of the growing tendency of electronic device usage, in-person surveying still remains an invaluable approach for getting in-depth information on how visitors use and move along trails, alongside with their motivations, preferences and general mindset. An annual, survey-based visitor monitoring project was launched in 2017 in the UNESCO Pilis Biosphere Reserve in Central Hungary with the above aims, where trip routes are questioned from trail users and recorded via counting sheets. These data are compiled into a unified database, which provides a basis for a visitor flow map and various analyses. This paper aims to present the current state of the modeling and processing framework we have been developing for representing and processing the trip routes recorded in textual form and translated into trail graph routes, alongside with the key challenges and findings we have so far. Beyond its particular local relevance, our approach has revealed significant general route information modeling aspects and considerations that are useful when dealing with the duality of text-based, human-described geographical route representations and their (possible or assumed) exact geo-localized linestring representations.