Visit potential: A common vocabulary for the analysis of entity-location interactions in mobility applications

A growing number of companies and public institutions use mobility data in their day-to-day business. One type of usage is the analysis of spatio-temporal interactions between mobile entities and geographic locations. In practice the employed measures depend on application demands and use context-specific terminology. Thus, a patchwork of measures has evolved which is not suitable for methodological research and interdisciplinary ex-change of ideas. The measures lack a systematic formalization and a uni-form terminology. In this paper we therefore systematically define meas-ures for entity-location interactions which we name visit potential. We provide a common vocabulary that can be applied for an entire class of mobility applications. We present two real-world scenarios which apply entity-location interaction measures and demonstrate how the employed measures can be precisely defined in terms of visit potential.