Daily Spatial Footprint of Warsaw Metropolitan Area (Poland) Commuters in Light of Volunteered Geographic Information and Common Factors of Urban Sprawl. A Pilot Study.

Urban sprawl directly affects on length of commuting. Acquisition of commuting data is based on theoretical (deductive) approaches, limited individual small observation samples or indirect phenomena like e.g. remote sensing night light data images. Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) make possible deeper insight into the daily spatial footprint of commuting and is related to urban sprawl. Data acquired during the collection of VGI data reveal some new aspects of spatial phenomena, which can be additionally analyzed. VGI data concerning spatial phenomena involve both geotagging as well time stamps of acquisition, which in turn make possible indirectly inferring about spatial and temporal move of people. Analysis of the available spatial and temporal VGI data in context of national surveying acquired resources (INSPIRE) and confronted to modelling approach of commuting is the subject of pilot study of Warsaw functional urban area. The results are promising due to inter alia, generalization of huge volume real data observations set unlike to formerly used theoretical modelling.