Crowd-sourcing Twitter data as a solution to emergency response to flooding in Jakarta

15785336539_294f5ee35d_oBy Dr Tomas Holderness & Dr Etienne Turpin

The early June release of the PetaJakarta.org White Paper marked the end of the first phase of the ground breaking research program. Continue reading

Tweet Semantics

Rodney ClarkeBy Associate Professor Rodney Clarke

All major approaches used to analyse tweets (statistical and machine learning) proceed from the segmentation and classification of lexical items (words). An alternative approach involving computer-based grammars is rarely used because they do not scale well to the dimensions necessary for the analysis of PetaJakarta tweet traffic. All current approaches are syntactic and asemantic. They are incapable of addressing questions concerning how citizens are actually using social media platforms during emergencies because they are incapable of explaining how language is structured for use. Continue reading

Floods and Social Media: Coping with the Deluge 3

Rodney ClarkeBy Associate Professor Rodney Clarke

The usual approaches to analysing the content of Tweets involve, for example, statistics, as well as techniques from the artificial intelligence community, specifically text mining and machine learning. Statistical approaches generally involve the analysis of word frequencies and the use of visualisation aides like tag clouds to indicate which key words are significant. Often these techniques are used in combination to examine the occurrence and collocation of key words associated with flooding. Continue reading

Floods and Social Media: Coping with the Deluge 1

Rodney ClarkeBy Associate Professor Rodney Clarke

Social media platforms are proliferating globally both in terms of the number of platforms and also the intensity of their use. Some countries use Twitter as a valid source of emergency information and incorporate it as one of the primary sources of emergency intelligence. Continue reading