Primary Contacts

Derek Masaki - NGP & Biological Informatics Program

Megan Hines - UW Madison

Dave Govoni - EWeb

Description

Additional Criteria

Product will be demonstrated at the 2012 CDI Workshop.

Benefit to FSP/Scientists/Mission Areas

The proposed project leverages existing efforts toward the use of social media systems for delivery of information into a web based visualization framework. Rather than support the development of an expensive system developed in-house, this proposal suggests the use of cloud-based social media system Twitter to provide a robust observation platform. Development efforts will be directed at utilizing the substantial Twitter API feature set to query the media stream for species observation submissions. Citizen science participants will be encouraged to use the Twitter direct message system to submit species observations using a pre-defined schema. Observations will be extracted from the Twitter stream, and processed using geospatial, chart and timeline modules.

In kind funding and work leveraged

Leverage

The proposed Twitter-based observation platform will leverage the development efforts of the USGS Earthquake Center. The USGS Twitter Earthquake Detector (USGS TED) has received several awards and media recognition for its social media earthquake detection system. The developers at USGS TED have offered to provide the harvest and spatial engine that currently drives the system. By providing the backend system, the TED team will significantly shorten the development timeline and overall cost of the proposed project.

The project will also receive programming resources provided in-kind by the University of Hawaii.
 
Funding

In Kind $6,250 for application development

Interaction with DMWG

Deliverable and its Measurable Benefit

Web Data Visualization Using Curated Twitter Submissions and Twitter Data Mining/Stream API

Methodology (process)

 
Tasks

1. Establish unique Twitter account to accept incoming direct messages
2. Develop submission protocol, document standard elements
3. Develop geolocation protocol (GPS resolution, nearest named place, county centroid, etc)
3. Develop routines to mine Twitter stream API
4. Create visualization modules for chart, map and timeline of curated content
 
Resources
Social media API programmer - In Kind Support
Geospatial programmer - In Kind Support
Project lead - In Kind Support
 

Partnerships

Core Science Analysis and Synthesis; National Geospatial Program; USGS Earthquake Center (Golden, CO);University of Wisconsin; University of Hawaii; Hawaii Invasive Species Coordinating Councils; Hawaii Geospatial Information Coordinating Committee;