GeoEvents - An Interactive Tool to Analyze and Visualize Spatial Information from the Social Web

A growing number of social media services like Flickr and Twitter allows for the association of locations with digital resources such as photos or text messages. This work tackles the problem of exploiting the abundance of such kind of data, by designing and implementing an application that analyzes and visualizes spatial information from different social media services. The application provides two different data retrieval modes, the scenarios and the exploring mode. The scenarios mode accesses information that was already harvested into a local storage, while the exploring mode retrieves information on the fly using the respective APIs. In both modes, information about the returned resources is aggregated on a map and displayed using different visualization means. In addition, the retrieved information is analyzed using three different analysis techniques.