Air Twitter Statement of Work

Back to Twitter FUNDing Friday Project

Many organizations are “listening” to the social-media chatter on the web in order to better serve their users. The FUNding Friday award will support the development of Air Twitter at Washington University and Ross and Associates (?) in conjunction with the ESIP Air Quality Workgroup (ESIP AQ WG), to “listen” for air quality phrases attached to user generated content like Twitter, blogs, Delicious and Flickr. This listening tool will allow the ESIP AQ WG to identify air quality events as they happen and harvest user concerns and requirements for the AQ Community.

Using existing aggregation services, we will mashup the search results from the social media sites using Yahoo Pipes. This aggregate feed will be tweeted with the air quality “community hash-tag” (e.g., #airquality). A Washington University student will monitor the ESIP AQ WG feed, identify AQ events. When events are identified, the location will be harvested from contextual information in the feed such as a place name or as development evolves IP address of tweet. To further automate event identification, Air Twitter feeds will be archived in order to conduct temporal trend analysis that can be used to separate the background noise from AQ events in the social media stream.

As the events are identified the Wash. U. student will create collaborative workspaces on the ESIP wiki to harvest event content. When collaborative EventSpaces are created, the ESIPAQWG twitter account will tweet the link to a relevant EventSpace wiki page and to data console with surface, satellite and model data for the given space and time to support AQ event evaluation. As appropriate, AQ Workgroup members may provide expert responses to the AQ social media by twittering relevant links (e.g., KML data layers or Smog Blog explanations) or contributing to the EventSpace for a particular event. The event spaces will be shared in near near-real-time to AIRNow and others will allow the AQ community to provide appropriate response and information at the right place and time.