Producing Volunteered Geographic Information from Social Media for LBSN Improvement

Authors

  • Maxwell Guimarães de Oliveira Laboratório de Sistemas de Informação, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG) - Brazil
  • Cláudio de Souza Baptista Laboratório de Sistemas de Informação, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG) - Brazil
  • Cláudio E. C. Campelo Laboratório de Sistemas de Informação, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG) - Brazil
  • José Amilton Moura Acioli Filho Laboratório de Sistemas de Informação, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG) - Brazil
  • Ana Gabrielle Ramos Falcão Laboratório de Sistemas de Informação, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG) - Brazil

Keywords:

Geoparsing, GIR, LBSN, Twitter, VGI

Abstract

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) emerged from the widespread of devices featuring GPS and Internet connectivity around the world. It has enabled the easier and increased production of spatial data, and a deeper engagement of people with everything involving location. Such scenario has led to the emergence of Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN), which allow users to be assigned to space related content. LBSN environments have proved to be quite useful, however, keeping users willing to contribute (i.e., maintaining such environments in continuous operation) has appeared to be challenging. In addressing this issue, we have considered applying Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR) techniques to produce VGI from social media streams on the Web, aiming to improve LBSN with valuable up-to-date content in an automated way. We rely on GIR techniques such as geoparsing the message bodies instead of considering previously geotagged information since we cannot ensure that an embedded geolocation is the same location that the messages refers to. An artifact for automatically producing VGI based on social media content is described and validated using a real-world case study. We harvested tweets during the FIFA Confederations Cup and tried to produce valuable VGI from the message stream. Our results proved to be promising for leveraging VGI from social media.

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Author Biographies

Maxwell Guimarães de Oliveira, Laboratório de Sistemas de Informação, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG) - Brazil

PhD student in Computer Science at Information Systems Laboratory (LSI), at the University of Campina Grande (UFCG). He also obtained his Masters Degree in Computer Science in 2012, at UFCG. His fields of interest include information systems and database, focusing on spatial data, volunteered geographic information (VGI), geographic information retrieval (GIR) and spatial big data.

Cláudio de Souza Baptista, Laboratório de Sistemas de Informação, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG) - Brazil

Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department and Director of the Information Systems Laboratory at the University of Campina Grande, Brazil. He received a PhD Degree in Computer Science from University of Kent at Canterbury, United Kingdom, in 2000. His research interests include database, digital libraries, geographical information systems and multimedia databases.

Cláudio E. C. Campelo, Laboratório de Sistemas de Informação, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG) - Brazil

Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department and member of the Information Systems Laboratory at the University of Campina Grande, Brazil. He received a PhD Degree in Computer Science from University of Leeds, United Kingdom, in 2013. His research interests include representation of spatial knowledge and space-time, geographic information retrieval, spatial databases, geographical information systems and spatial data infrastructure and modeling.

José Amilton Moura Acioli Filho, Laboratório de Sistemas de Informação, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG) - Brazil

Masters student in Computer Science at Information Systems Laboratory (LSI), at the University of Campina Grande (UFCG). He also obtained his Bachelors Degree in Computer Science at UFCG.

Ana Gabrielle Ramos Falcão, Laboratório de Sistemas de Informação, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG) - Brazil

Graduated in Computer Science in 2010 and obtained her Masters Degree in 2013, both at the University of Campina Grande (UFCG). Today she is a researcher at the Information Systems Laboratory (LSI) at UFCG, where she has been participating since 2008.

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Published

2015-10-12