Trajectories: Analysis
Noam Shoval · International Encyclopedia of Geography · 2017
A trajectory is defined in its broad sense as the path that a moving object follows through space as a function of time. In the context of human geography a trajectory or space–time activity of humans is not predefined, but a result of constraints and decisions. Time geography created some decades ago a conceptual framework for explaining and visualizing trajectories of people. However, the past decade witnessed a dramatic growth in the implementation of global positioning systems, smartphones, and other tracking technologies for collecting high‐resolution space–time data. As a result, a remarkable number of highly accurate trajectories are available for analysis and new ways of analyzing these space–time data are being developed in order to better understand various geographical phenomena. Among them, sequence alignment methods are highly suitable for trajectories analysis in geography since unlike other quantitative methods for trajectories analysis, sequence alignment is concerned with the order (or sequence) of events.