See it, while it’s hot! MultiOSN: Monitoring real-world events on online social media

Today, the world is a place where “chats” refer to Facebook chats, when people “hang out”, they are referring to Google+, and “following” someone is a Twitter thing! The penetration of social media into the common Internet user’s life has been so intense, that people literally “tweet” about an earthquake before running to safety!

Online social media has become one of the fastest, and most widely used means of information transfer today. Especially, when it comes to news, a big proportion of people look for breaking news on Facebook and Twitter! This paradigm shift has resulted because of multiple reasons, the reach of the Internet and online social media, the crowd-sourcing aspect, and the immediacy factor. By and large, online social media has become the best place to look for the latest activity, and keep up-to-date. Acknowledging this fact, and the role of online social media in the modern world, we at Precog@IIITD, have come up with MultiOSN, a tool which monitors multiple online social media during real-world events, and presents analytics based on real-time activity. MultiOSN is our first baby step towards building real-time event monitoring systems to extract knowledge, make interesting analysis and inferences from the data, and visualize the data in usable form, which can help somebody with actionable information. Currently, MultiOSN tracks five social media services viz. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, and Flickr.

MultiOSN provides basic, but crucial information floating all over the web of online social media, about real-world events. The number of posts per hour, in the past 24 hours, geographical locations from where these posts have been made, and sentiment analysis are among the few analytics that are presented. Events like Boston Marathon blasts are a perfect example of the kind that can be tracked by organizations / individuals using MultiOSN, and utilize the analytics to potentially detect and prevent further damage. We believe these types of analytics during events like Mumbai Blasts, North Eastern Crisis, can be of great help to various departments of National Governments. For the common users, MultiOSN can be used to visualize events like the IPL (Indian Premiere League) to see which team is being talked about, which players have been making an impact, what is the sentiment of social media users towards the IPL, etc. What makes MultiOSN effective is the fact that all analysis is updated and shown in real-time; while the event is in progress in the real world. Such monitoring can be immensely effective in disaster management during emergencies; in the past we have analyzed various events of emergencies in India (past work). For example, the news of earthquakes, riots, etc. has been witnessed to break faster on social media than by any other means. This kind of critical information about earthquake locations and magnitude, riot locations, if monitored in real-time, can help minimize damage in areas which are expected to be affected next by such events. This is one of the major endeavors of MultiOSN.

The system is now live at http://precog.iiitd.edu.in/tools/beta/multiosnportal/. Feel free to explore more, and email us your valuable feedback at pk [at] iiitd [dot] ac [dot] in. For more details and insights into MultiOSN, please read the technical report here.

Image credits: http://redcrosschat.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/205547170462558700_Ks134xFV_c.jpg