Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi (IIIT-D) researchers has come up with a new system of monitoring online social media namely MultiOSN. The newly introduced system has the ability to monitor multiple online social media during real-world events, which also included the just-concluded IPL series. Presently, it is tracking five social media services - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, and Flickr.
According to the researchers at Precog@IIITD, a group of researchers working on online social media, led by Professor Ponnurangam Kumaraguru has said that the system quickly gives essential, however, vital information available all over the web of online social media, about real-world events. Researchers also added that MutiOSN analyses 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.
The researchers group while acknowledging the fact that online social media has become one of the fastest, and most widely used means of information transfer today, has mentioned that MultiOSN is their first step towards building complete real-time event monitoring systems to extract knowledge, make interesting analysis and inferences from the data, and visualize the data in usable form.
Furthermore, according to the researchers events such as Boston Marathon blasts are a perfect example of the kind that can be tracked by organizations/ individuals using MultiOSN, and employ the analytics to potentially perceive and stop further damage. Kumaraguru has mentioned that in case of common users, MultiOSN can be used to visualize events like the IPL to observe which team is being talked about, which players have been making an impact, what is the sentiment of social media users towards the IPL, amidst other. Besides, as per researchers MultiOSN's efficiency can be measured from the fact that all analysis is updated and shown in real-time; while the event is in development in the real world.
In a statement issued by Prateek, a PhD student at Precog@IIITD has said such monitoring can be enormously successful in disaster management during emergencies; in the past they have analyzed various events of emergencies in India. For example, the news of earthquakes, riots, etc. has been witnessed to break faster on social media than by any other means. Besides, he added that 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. He added that this is one of the major endeavors of MultiOSN.
