The Twitter Observatory - Exploring Social and Semantic Relationships in Social Media

With the rapid growth of social media and the mature of Web Science research, there is a crucial need for a new generation of open analytics environment, which are able to observe and analyze what is happening in social media. To meet this need, we propose the Twitter Observatory, which is designed to collect data from Twitter in real-time, and enable the analytics of both social and semantic data. This paper introduces the development and implementation of a work-in-progress prototype of the proposed Twitter Observatory, as well as discussions of our ongoing research.