Microbloggers as Sensors for Public Transport Breakdowns

Microblogging has spread to fields where real-time awareness is crucial, such as predicting natural disasters or health outbreaks. Services such as Twitter can provide time-sensitive information from citizens, who have become sensors of important events by means of their digital footprints left through the use of mobile devices. User-generated data in urban contexts have been explored, mainly to infer and monitor public transport flows. Here, the authors use the observations and complaints from human sensors, collected through Twitter, to demonstrate how social sensing has the ability to detect breakdowns in a public transport network in real time, beyond official surveillance information. The system collects, filters, and processes the large datasets obtained to detect the daily problems in a public transport railway network of a major city and disseminate the results for user consumption through graphical rendering.