Challenges for social flows

Amid a growing abundance and usage of social flow data, we extend formal definitions of this data type, create new typologies, address new problems, and redefine social distance as the manifestation of social flows. Next, we outline challenges to fully leveraging these data with commercial GISystems by providing examples and potential solutions for representing, visualizing, manipulating, statistically analyzing and ascribing meaning to social flows. The goal of this discussion is to improve the dexterity of social flow data for geographic, environmental and social research questions.