Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Harvesting ambient geospatial information from social media feeds

A paper I  recently co-authored with Anthony Stefanidis and Jacek Radzikowski from George Mason University entitled "Harvesting ambient geospatial information from social media feeds" is now available in  GeoJournal. 
 
The abstract for the paper reads as follows: "Social media generated from many individuals is playing a greater role in our daily lives and provides a unique opportunity to gain valuable insight on information flow and social networking within a society. Through data collection and analysis of its content, it supports a greater mapping and understanding of the evolving human landscape. The information disseminated through such media represents a deviation from volunteered geography, in the sense that it is not geographic information per se. Nevertheless, the message often has geographic footprints, for example, in the form of locations from where the tweets originate, or references in their content to geographic entities. We argue that such data conveys ambient geospatial information, capturing for example, people’s references to locations that represent momentary social hotspots. In this paper we address a framework to harvest such ambient geospatial information, and resulting hybrid capabilities to analyze it to support situational awareness as it relates to human activities. We argue that this emergence of ambient geospatial analysis represents a second step in the evolution of geospatial data availability, following on the heels of volunteered geographical information."

Geolocating pairs of tweeters and retweeters

1 comment:

Social Network Analysis said...

Facebook, Google+,unthink,Twitter and now Tulalip.Yes Microsoft is now designing the new social networking site named Tulalip.Tulalip was first seen about four days ago and was first reported on Fusible. Tulalip is in the phase of the early development you can expect hundreds of changes in the next few months. Microsoft claims that the first view of this social network was mistakenly published on the web and they actually didn’t mean to do that. Tulalip will be accessible later on the domain name socl.com which was recently bought by Microsoft. It is rumored that Microsoft boughtsocl.com on the same day when Google+ was first announced. That definitely means that Microsoft wants to join the social network forces and if they integrate their Microsoft softwares like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Skype, etc. All these services, if integrated would make Tulalip superior to other social networking sites.