Monitoring tourists and visitors through coarse mobile phone data

Visitors and tourists are among the more important urban populations for their impact on local economy, on global fluxes dimensions and on urban vitality and attractiveness. In recent years we assisted at an extraordinary increase in mobile communications and mobile phone is the widest adopted technology. Within the field of urban computing, a new approach has emerged for mapping urban dynamics. In this paper we will introduce and exploit a novel kind of data, namely HLR MSC counters. In this paper we present our research showing how this kind of data can help monitoring and mapping spatial and temporal variability of population, visitors and tourists, in the Lombardia region.