scholarly journals Using Social Media Data to Map Mortar Shells Falling in Damascus, Syria

Author(s):  
Mohamad Hasan

The paper analyzes the use of social media data in geographical information systems to map the areas most affected by mortar shells in the capital of Syria, Damascus, by using geocoded and parsed social media data in geographical information systems. This paper describes a created algorithm to collecting and store data from social media sites. For the data store both a NoSQL database to save JSON format document and an RDBMS is used to save other spatial data types. A python script was written to collect the data in social media based on certain keywords related to the search. A geocoding algorithm to locate social media posts that normalize, standardize and tokenize the text was developed. The result of the developed diagram provided a year by year from 2013 to 2018 maps for mortar shell falling locations in Damascus. These layers give an overview for the changing of the numbers of mortar shells falls or in hot spot analysis for the city. Finally, social media data can prove to be useful when creating maps for dynamic social phenomena, for example, mortar shells’ location falling in Damascus, Syria. Moreover, social media data provide easy, massive, and timestamped data which makes these phenomena easier to study.

Author(s):  
Michael Vassilakopoulos

A Spatial Database is a database that offers spatial data types, a query language with spatial predicates, spatial indexing techniques, and efficient processing of spatial queries. All these fields have attracted the focus of researchers over the past 25 years. The main reason for studying spatial databases has been applications that emerged during this period, such as Geographical Information Systems, Computer-Aided Design, Very Large Scale Integration design, Multimedia Information Systems, and so forth. In parallel, the field of temporal databases, databases that deal with the management of timevarying data, attracted the research community since numerous database applications (i.e., Banking, Personnel Management, Transportation Scheduling) involve the notion of time.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 433-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rion Brattig Correia ◽  
Ian B. Wood ◽  
Johan Bollen ◽  
Luis M. Rocha

Social media data have been increasingly used to study biomedical and health-related phenomena. From cohort-level discussions of a condition to population-level analyses of sentiment, social media have provided scientists with unprecedented amounts of data to study human behavior associated with a variety of health conditions and medical treatments. Here we review recent work in mining social media for biomedical, epidemiological, and social phenomena information relevant to the multilevel complexity of human health. We pay particular attention to topics where social media data analysis has shown the most progress, including pharmacovigilance and sentiment analysis, especially for mental health. We also discuss a variety of innovative uses of social media data for health-related applications as well as important limitations of social media data access and use.


Author(s):  
Mohamad Hasan

This paper presents a model to collect, save, geocode, and analyze social media data. The model is used to collect and process the social media data concerned with the ISIS terrorist group (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), and to map the areas in Syria most affected by ISIS accordingly to the social media data. Mapping process is assumed automated compilation of a density map for the geocoded tweets. Data mined from social media (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) is recognized as dynamic and easily accessible resources that can be used as a data source in spatial analysis and geographical information system. Social media data can be represented as a topic data and geocoding data basing on the text of the mined from social media and processed using Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods. NLP is a subdomain of artificial intelligence concerned with the programming computers to analyze natural human language and texts. NLP allows identifying words used as an initial data by developed geocoding algorithm. In this study, identifying the needed words using NLP was done using two corpora. First corpus contained the names of populated places in Syria. The second corpus was composed in result of statistical analysis of the number of tweets and picking the words that have a location meaning (i.e., schools, temples, etc.). After identifying the words, the algorithm used Google Maps geocoding API in order to obtain the coordinates for posts.


Author(s):  
Markus Schneider

A data type comprises a set of homogeneous values together with a collection of operations defined on them. This chapter emphasizes the importance of crisp spatial data types, fuzzy spatial data types, and spatiotemporal data types for representing static, vague, and time-varying geometries in Geographical Information Systems (GIS). These data types provide a fundamental abstraction for modeling the geometric structure of crisp spatial, fuzzy spatial, and moving objects in space and time as well as their relationships, properties, and operations. The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview and description of these data types and their operations that have been proposed in research and can be found in GIS, spatial databases, moving objects databases, and other spatial software tools. The use of data types, operations, and predicates will be illustrated by their embedding into query languages.


2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 633-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Pasek ◽  
Colleen A. McClain ◽  
Frank Newport ◽  
Stephanie Marken

Researchers hoping to make inferences about social phenomena using social media data need to answer two critical questions: What is it that a given social media metric tells us? And who does it tell us about? Drawing from prior work on these questions, we examine whether Twitter sentiment about Barack Obama tells us about Americans’ attitudes toward the president, the attitudes of particular subsets of individuals, or something else entirely. Specifically, using large-scale survey data, this study assesses how patterns of approval among population subgroups compare to tweets about the president. The findings paint a complex picture of the utility of digital traces. Although attention to subgroups improves the extent to which survey and Twitter data can yield similar conclusions, the results also indicate that sentiment surrounding tweets about the president is no proxy for presidential approval. Instead, after adjusting for demographics, these two metrics tell similar macroscale, long-term stories about presidential approval but very different stories at a more granular level and over shorter time periods.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayse Giz Gulnerman ◽  
Himmet Karaman ◽  
Direnc Pekaslan ◽  
Serdar Bilgi

Social media (SM) can be an invaluable resource in terms of understanding and managing the effects of catastrophic disasters. In order to use SM platforms for public participatory (PP) mapping of emergency management activities, a bias investigation should be undertaken with regard to the data related to the study area (urban, regional or national, etc.) to determine the spatial data dynamics. Thus, such determinations can be made on how SM can be used and interpreted in terms of PP. In this study, the city of Istanbul was chosen for social media data research area, as it is one of the most crowded cities in the world and expecting a major earthquake. The methodology for the data investigation is: 1. Obtain data and engage sampling, 2. Identify the representation and temporal biases in the data and normalize it in response to representation bias, 3. Identify general anomalies and spatial anomalies, 4. Manipulate the trend of the dataset with the discretization of anomalies and 5. Examine the spatiotemporal bias. Using this bias investigation methodology, citizen footprint dynamics in the city were determined and reference maps (most likely regional anomaly maps, representation maps, time-space bias maps, etc.) were produced. The outcomes of the study can be summarized in four steps. First, highly active users generate the majority of the data and removing this data as a general approach within a pseudo-cleaning process means concealing a large amount of data. Second, data normalization in terms of activity levels, changes the anomaly outcome resulting from diverse representation levels of users. Third, spatiotemporally normalized data present strong spatial anomaly tendency in some parts of the central area. Fourth, trend data is dense in the central area and the spatiotemporal bias assessments show the data density varies in terms of the time of day, day of week and season of the year. The methodology proposed in this study can be used to extract the unbiased daily routines of the social media data of the regions for the normal days and this can be referred for the emergency or unexpected event cases to detect the change or impacts.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4.38) ◽  
pp. 939
Author(s):  
Nur Atiqah Sia Abdullah ◽  
Hamizah Binti Anuar

Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social media platforms among netizen. People are now more aggressive to express their opinions, perceptions, and emotions through social media platforms. These massive data provide great value for the data analyst to understand patterns and emotions related to a certain issue. Mining the data needs techniques and time, therefore data visualization becomes trending in representing these types of information. This paper aims to review data visualization studies that involved data from social media postings. Past literature used node-link diagram, node-link tree, directed graph, line graph, heatmap, and stream graph to represent the data collected from the social media platforms. An analysis by comparing the social media data types, representation, and data visualization techniques is carried out based on the previous studies. This paper critically discussed the comparison and provides a suggestion for the suitability of data visualization based on the type of social media data in hand.      


Spatium ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 59-67
Author(s):  
Klemen Prah ◽  
Andrej Lisec ◽  
Anka Lisec

Many real-world spatially related problems, including river-basin planning and management, give rise to geographical information system based decision making, since the performance of spatial policy alternatives were traditionally and are still often represented by thematic maps. Advanced technologies and approaches, such as geographical information systems (GIS), offer a unique opportunity to tackle spatial problems traditionally associated with more efficient and effective data collection, analysis, and alternative evaluation. This paper discusses the advantages and challenges of the use of digital spatial data and geographical information systems in river basis management. Spatial data on social, environmental and other spatial conditions for the study area of 451.77 km2, the Slovenian part of the Sotla river basin, are used to study the GIS capabilities of supporting spatial decisions in the framework of river basin management.


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