Cyber-physical Directory: A Dynamic Visualization of Social Media Data

Information about people, places and events are examples of social data. These social data, widely spread on the Internet, are also displayed by directories directly in the physical world, enhancing interactivity and guiding people at a specific location. However, they are usually large, and reading these directories is time-consuming because they are not personalized, with information unrelated to a person´s needs. Moreover these social data are static and may be irrelevant for many readers. This paper presents a new cyber-physical system: the cyber-physical directory, which provides a user with a customised and dynamic visualization of social data. An algorithm, based on the similarity between people and social data, finds which data are relevant to a specific user and displays them by using tag cloud techniques. The system is successfully tested with a real dataset from Foursquare, and an implementation is presented.