Utilizing Twitter to Locate or Track an Object of Interest.

摘要

Data in online social networks can be used as a resource to locate persons of interest. The two key issues are the accuracy and the length of time to carry out the necessary categorization, correlation, and sifting. Literally millions of data items-most unintentionally prepared to facilitate analysis-are posted and made available through public data feeds. The lack of appropriate tools and schemas inhibit efficient identification and extraction of information. The broad applicability of locating persons of interest extends to humanitarian assistance and disasterrelief efforts, finding missing person(s), reconstructing movements of people, and prognosticating future movement of people. This research defines a method that was shown to be effective in utilizing social network data (Twitter) to locate and track a person of interest. A combination of C programming language and structured query sequences was integrated with SQL to correlate and sort hundreds of thousands of data items.