Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
What you tweeted while you were out ringing in the New Year could be used as a source of information for urban planning and land use, researchers report in a recent edition of the journal Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence.
Enrique Frías-Martínez, a computer science researcher at Telefonica Research, and his sister Vanessa, from the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies, explain that the millions of people using Twitter constantly report where they are and what they are going.
As a result, millions of people are generating a tremendous amount localized content using Twitter and other social networks, as well as mobile applications. This information, the study authors claim, could be used to gauge the interaction between people and their environment.
This could be used to provide guidelines for planning city life, improving urban development by avoiding potential issues with noise and dirt. In fact, the Frías-Martínez siblings said that they’ve already used their technique to identify nightlife areas of Manhattan, Madrid and London.
“Geolocalized tweets can be a very useful source of information for planning, since it is an activity carried out by a large number of people who provide information on where they are at a specific time and what they are doing,” Enrique Frías-Martínez explained in a statement.
“Thanks to the increased use of smartphones, social networks like Twitter and Facebook have made it possible to access and produce information ubiquitously,” he added. These social media outlets generate tags with an event’s geolocation, and he believes that information “could be highly suited to helping in urban planning, especially in identifying land use.”
By using Twitter, it is possible to collect information on urban land use more efficiently and for a far greater number of people than by using traditional questionnaires, Enrique said.
In addition, traditional types of consultation tend to be more costly and less accurate when it comes to planning activities, while the new method uses social media to automatically determine land use in an urban area by grouping together regions of similar activity patterns.
Using aggregate tweet activity, Enrique and his sister were able to study land use in Manhattan, Madrid and London. In the first two locations, they identified four primary uses: business, residential, daytime leisure (mainly parks and tourist areas) and nightlife areas. In London, they also identified industrial land uses, and their results were validated with open data sources.
“One of the most interesting contributions of the study is the identification of nightlife areas, since this type of land use in not often specified in urban planning, despite the problems of noise, security and need for cleaning that this creates,” Enrique explained.
As a result, the information is “very relevant,” he added. In this respect, the research revealed that in Madrid, night-time tweet activity is concentrated on weekends, while it tends to be focused on weekdays in Manhattan. London, conversely, is characterized by its tweeting activity in daytime leisure areas, the researchers discovered.
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