Assessing the effect of weather on human outdoor perception using Twitter

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesHuman Comfort in Outdoor Spaces (HCOS) is linked to physical, physiological and psychological responses of people to environmental variables. Previous studies have established comfort ranges for these variables through questionnaires, reaching only small populations. However, larger amounts of data could not only generate more robust results in local studies, but also allow the possibility of creating an approach that could be applied into a wider range of weather conditions and different climates. This thesis describes a new methodology to assess people’s perception of weather based on human responses to weather conditions extracted from tweets, with the purpose of establishing comfort ranges for environmental variables. Tweets containing weather-associated keywords were collected using the Twitter API and then linked to real-time meteorological data acquired from the Open Weather Map API, which provides weather variables measured nearby the locations in which the tweets were posted. Afterwards, people’s perception of weather was extracted from the tweets using a classifier trained specifically on weather data that identified irrelevant, neutral, positive and negative tweets. The obtained tweets and their related meteorological data were analyzed to establish comfort ranges. Comparing the resulting ranges to others obtained in previous studies, a generally good agreement was found with the indices Effective Temperature (ET) and Termohygrometric index (THI) derived from questionnaires, but the peak of comfort is shifted towards lower and higher temperatures, respectively. Regarding the single weather variables, the obtained comfort ranges are alike the ones found in previous research, in particular, the temperature comfort range matches perfectly at 20 °C – 22 °C. Therefore, it was concluded that tweets can be used for the assessment of HCOS; not only the results of this methodology are comparable to the ones obtained in previous studies, but also the procedure itself shows new features and opportunities for future applications

Cultural Heritage Storytelling, Engagement and Management in the Era of Big Data and the Semantic Web

The current Special Issue launched with the aim of further enlightening important CH areas, inviting researchers to submit original/featured multidisciplinary research works related to heritage crowdsourcing, documentation, management, authoring, storytelling, and dissemination. Audience engagement is considered very important at both sites of the CH production–consumption chain (i.e., push and pull ends). At the same time, sustainability factors are placed at the center of the envisioned analysis. A total of eleven (11) contributions were finally published within this Special Issue, enlightening various aspects of contemporary heritage strategies placed in today’s ubiquitous society. The finally published papers are related but not limited to the following multidisciplinary topics:Digital storytelling for cultural heritage;Audience engagement in cultural heritage;Sustainability impact indicators of cultural heritage;Cultural heritage digitization, organization, and management;Collaborative cultural heritage archiving, dissemination, and management;Cultural heritage communication and education for sustainable development;Semantic services of cultural heritage;Big data of cultural heritage;Smart systems for Historical cities – smart cities;Smart systems for cultural heritage sustainability

Geo-Information Harvesting from Social Media Data

As unconventional sources of geo-information, massive imagery and text messages from open platforms and social media form a temporally quasi-seamless, spatially multi-perspective stream, but with unknown and diverse quality. Due to its complementarity to remote sensing data, geo-information from these sources offers promising perspectives, but harvesting is not trivial due to its data characteristics. In this article, we address key aspects in the field, including data availability, analysis-ready data preparation and data management, geo-information extraction from social media text messages and images, and the fusion of social media and remote sensing data. We then showcase some exemplary geographic applications. In addition, we present the first extensive discussion of ethical considerations of social media data in the context of geo-information harvesting and geographic applications. With this effort, we wish to stimulate curiosity and lay the groundwork for researchers who intend to explore social media data for geo-applications. We encourage the community to join forces by sharing their code and data.Comment: Accepted for publication IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazin

Access to Digital Cultural Heritage: Innovative Applications of Automated Metadata Generation Chapter 1: Digitization of Cultural Heritage – Standards, Institutions, Initiatives

The first chapter "Digitization of Cultural Heritage – Standards, Institutions, Initiatives" provides an introduction to the area of digitisation. The main pillars of process of creating, preserving and accessing of cultural heritage in digital space are observed. The importance of metadata in the process of accessing to information is outlined. The metadata schemas and standards used in cultural heritage are discussed. In order to reach digital objects in virtual space they are organized in digital libraries. Contemporary digital libraries are trying to deliver richer and better functionality, which usually is user oriented and depending on current IT trend. Additionally, the chapter is focused on some initiatives on world and European level that during the years enforce the process of digitization and organizing digital objects in the cultural heritage domain. In recent years, the main focus in the creation of digital resources shifts from "system-centred" to "user-centred" since most of the issues around this content are related to making it accessible and usable for the real users. So, the user studies and involving the users on early stages of design and planning the functionality of the product which is being developed stands on leading position

Some Advances in Aspect Analysis of User-Generated Content

Starting from the online reviews associated with an overall rating, the aim is to propose a methodology for detecting the main aspects (or topics) of interest for users, and afterwards to estimate the aspect ratings latently assigned in each review jointly with the weight or emphasis put on each aspect