Georeferencing sentiment scores to map and explore tourist points of interest

Tourists are increasingly involved in co-creating attractions’ symbolic images, sharing their experiences and opinions on websites like TripAdvisor and other similar rating and review platforms. In this paper, we propose a strate- gy for analyzing people’ opinions about tourist points of interest, using an Ambient Geographic Information approach to georeference the polarity scores of reviews. Visualizing these scores on a map can be used to obtain helpful information for implementing strategic actions and policies of institu- tional and business actors involved in the tourist industry, as well as to help users plan their future experiences. A case study concerning the reviews of the restaurants in Naples (Italy) shows the effectiveness of the proposal