Abstract
It is interesting to exploit the user generated content (UGC), and to use it with a view to infer new data; volunteered geographic information (VGI) is a concept derived from UGC, which main importance lies in its continuously updated data. The present approach tries to explode the use of VGI, by collecting data from a social network and a RSS service; the short texts collected from the social network are written in Spanish language; a text mining and a recovery information processes are applied over the data, in order to remove special characters on text, and to extract relevant information about the traffic events on the study area, then data are geocoded. The texts are classified by using a machine learning algorithm into five classes, each of them represents a specific traffic event or situation.
TopBackground
User generated content (UGC) is any publication on internet, done by users of web services such as blogs, wikis, forums, social networks, podcast and chats. It is used in many applications, including: researches, information and news spread, problems processing, disaster management, and collaborative mapping. UGC has originated some other concepts, volunteered geographic information (VGI) and crowdsourcing are two of them (Chard, 2015).
Crowdsourcing is the process of getting ideas, information, or work done, from a group of interested people; it has been a recurrent data and services source for some businesses and researches (Chard, 2015). Mobile devices as smartphones, mobile GPS, cartographic applications and social networks, make crowdsourcing possible.
According to Wen Lin (2013), VGI is composed of volunteered information generated by users, who have not a geographic specialized knowledge, but are interested on provide data with geographic characteristics; such data are employed on many web services as Open Street Map (OSM), WikiMapia, Google Maps, among others. This association between VGI and web services are the GeoWeb basis.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Geocoding: The process to obtain coordinates from spatial reference data on texts, such as street names or landmarks.
Microblogging Service: A service to distribute content to a group of members by internet, such content could be short texts, small audios or video links.
Traffic: The movement of people, vehicles or merchandise through the roads, it can be fluent or congested.
Gazetteer: A geographical dictionary that contains information about socio-economic statistics and physical features of a geographic area.
Social Network: A web platform where people shares interests, activities and stablish social relations by virtual connections.
RSS Service: A document used to publish frequently updated information, which includes text and metadata.
Metadata: The data that contains some other data or labels it, to describe its content, such as coordinates or URL information.