Construction of a Geo-Location Service Utilizing Microblogging Platforms

The popularity of social media over the past several years, especially sites such as Twitter, has presented a network for up to the minute information on events across the globe. The information presented on these sites can be extremely helpful in the case of an emergency, however, the vast amount of data to examine and the low adoption of geo-tagging on this site makes it difficult, if not impossible, for emergency services to respond to information gathered from social media. Taking this into consideration, this paper presents a proof of concept for identifying and retrieving different geo-locations from Tweets and extracting the GPS coordinates from this data to approximately plot them in a map.