IIIT-D MultiOSN system swiftly provides basic, but crucial information floating all over the web of online social media

Updated on: Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Researchers at the IIIT-D have come up with a new system called MultiOSN, which has been monitoring multiple online social media during real-world events, including the just-concluded IPL series, and presenting an analysis in real-time.

The system swiftly provides basic, but crucial information floating all over the web of online social media, about real-world events, according to the researchers at Precog@IIITD, a research group working on online social media, led by professor Ponnurangam Kumaraguru.

Acknowledging that online social media has become one of the fastest, and most widely used means of information transfer today, they say that MultiOSN is their first step towards building comprehensive real-time event monitoring systems to extract knowledge, make interesting analysis and inferences from the data, and visualise the data in usable form.

Currently, it is tracking five social media services namely Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, and Flickr.

"MutiOSN analyses number of posts per hour, in the past 24 hours, geographical locations from where these posts have been made, and sentiment analysis are among the few analytics that are presented," the researchers say.

According to them, events like Boston Marathon blasts are a perfect example of the kind that can be tracked by organisations/ individuals using MultiOSN, and utilise the analytics to potentially detect and prevent further damage.

"For the common users, MultiOSN can be used to visualise events like the IPL to see which team is being talked about, which players have been making an impact, what is the sentiment of social media users towards the IPL, among other," said Kumaraguru.

MultiOSN's effectiveness can be gauged from the fact that all analysis is updated and shown in real-time; while the event is in progress in the real world, the researchers say. "Such monitoring can be immensely effective in disaster management during emergencies; in the past we have analysed various events of emergencies in India. For example, the news of earthquakes, riots, etc. has been witnessed to break faster on social media than by any other means," says Prateek, a PhD student at Precog@IIITD.

"This kind of critical information about earthquake locations and magnitude, riot locations, if monitored in real-time, can help minimise damage in areas which are expected to be affected next by such events. This is one of the major endeavours of MultiOSN," says Prateek.

IIIT-D MultiOSN system swiftly provides basic, but crucial information floating all over the web of online social media

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