Towards a collaborative geosocial analysis workbench

Abstract

Social media contributions are manifestations of humans acting as sensors, participating in activities, reacting to events, and reporting issues that are considered important. Harvesting this information offers a unique opportunity to monitor the human landscape, and gain unparalleled situational awareness, especially as it relates to sociocultural dynamics. However, this requires the emergence of a novel GeoSocial analysis paradigm. Towards this goal, in this paper we present a framework for collaborative GeoSocial analysis, which is designed around data harvesting from social media feeds (starting with twitter and flickr) and the concept of a collaborative GeoSocial Analysis Workbench (G-SAW). We present key concepts of this framework, and early test implementation results in order to demonstrate the potential of the G-SAW framework for enhanced situational awareness.