Mining spatio-temporal information on microblogging streams using a density-based online clustering method

Social networks have been regarded as a timely and cost-effective source of spatio-temporal information for many fields of application. However, while some research groups have successfully developed topic detection methods from the text streams for a while, and even some popular microblogging services such as Twitter did provide information of top trending topics for selection, it is still unable to fully support users for picking up all of the real-time event topics with a comprehensive spatio-temporal viewpoint to satisfy their information needs. This paper aims to investigate how microblogging social networks (i.e. Twitter) can be used as a reliable information source of emerging events by extracting their spatio-temporal features from the messages to enhance event awareness. In this work, we applied a density-based online clustering method for mining microblogging text streams, in order to obtain temporal and geospatial features of real-world events. By analyzing the events detected by our system, the temporal and spatial impacts of the emerging events can be estimated, for achieving the goals of situational awareness and risk management. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.