To manage a big event requires tracking in real time the movement of crowds. Solution based on mobile network data analysis are effective, but expensive. Obtaining comparable results by analysing public social stream has a clear commercial potential, especially considering that, being able to access also the content of a micro-post, the analysis can also track the attention of crowds.

In this demonstration, we present an approach for tracking the movements of the crowd in a big event based on the analysis of geo-tagged tweets. In particular we refer to tweets regarding the Open Ceremony Event of the London 2012 Olympic Games considered from different point of view: Olympic Stadium Area, London, Europe and World. You can read out more in the paper we submitted to the Semantic Web Challenge 2012.

Play with the live demo application

• Demonstrative page
• Behind the scene page

*** this demonstrator is currently not on line ***
*** we are using the machine to run our experiment on Social Listening Milano ***

Watch the movies on youtube:

• Olympic Stadium Area movie - It frames the area of the Olympic stadium. It shows the people gathering in the stadium and pops up random tweets from the most crowded areas
• London Metropolitan Area Movie - It frames the the London Metropolitan area. In the first part, it shows a continuous flow of people exiting Stratford station, funnelling through Stratford walk, entering the stadium. During the entire ceremony the crowd only twitted from the stadium. The last part shows a fading crowd in the stadium area.
• Europe Movie - it frames Europe. It shows the attraction the opening ceremony had over Europe.
  
• World Movie - it frames the entire World. It shows attraction the opening ceremony had all over the World.

Watch the linked data version of the tweets (they are published using the Streaming Linked Data approach):

• access the stream Graph (sGraph) of Stratford Station Area and access the tweets by clicking on the instantaneous graphs (iGraphs)
• access sGraph of Outside Olympic Stadium Area and access the tweets by clicking on the instantaneous graphs (iGraphs)
• access sGraph of Inside Olympic Stadium and access the tweets by clicking on the instantaneous graphs (iGraphs)

NOTE: sGraphs can be empty. It means no tweets hav been found by the continuous query upstream (see the behind the scene page for more details)