From Research to Applications: What Can We Extract with Social Media Sensing?

With the constant growth of social media in our daily lives, a huge amount of information is generated online by multiple social networks. However, what can we actually extract with the science of social media sensing? It is a very challenging task to mine meaningful data out of this vast crowdsourcing volume, which also rapidly changes or ends up being misleading. The scope of this paper is to present different approaches that overcome these challenges and utilize social media information from various sources. This work illustrates applications that: improve the performance of architectural design; preserve the cultural heritage; enhance citizen security; provide early detection for disasters; and discover creeping crisis events. A large variety of analyses are presented, including, among other, disaster or crime event detection, user identity linkage, relevance classification, and community detection techniques. The evaluation of the presented methods is also given in this article, proving that they can be practical and valuable in many applications.