ABSTRACT
In this contribution, we use the prevalence of web-based information services and their content classification to study the structure of China’s service-oriented economy, at the province level as well as at the prefecture city level. Using the unique resource of an open directory of web content providers which can be regarded as metadata of web-based big social science data, we present the new geography of this fast growing component of the Chinese economy. To better grasp the driving forces behind this industry of the twenty-first century, we also drill down to a number of meaningful semantic content categories so that specific business orientations and geographies of information consumption can be depicted on a functional and semantic basis. The article discusses the resulting distributions of web contents across the country, contrasts this emerging geography with the geography of economic activities at large and looks for factors of China’s geography of the knowledge economy using a decision tree machine learning technique. This research is illustrative of the potential for web-based big social science data for regional and urban science research.
