Twitter can be used for all sorts of things - to keep in touch with your friends (and even those you don’t know so well), and to keep abreast of the latest happenings in technology, the arts, what’s going on in your community, and much more. One of the capabilities offered by Twitter is their Geo API, which lets developers build geolocation into their tweets and twitter-based applications. Here’s an example of leveraging geolocated tweets to learn more about crime using the ArcGIS Explorer Twitter add-in.
Here we’ve used the add-in’s keyword search to find all tweets using the word “burglary” within a 10-mile location of where we’ve clicked. Any tweet that uses the keyword will be found and placed on our map.
To do this we clicked the add-in’s Search tab, entered our keyword and search radius, and used the pointer tool to choose the location for the search on our map.
One of the matches we found was from a specific user source named alexandr_crime. This source uses information from spotcrime.com to generate geolocated tweets of where crimes have been reported. Note that it shows up in our results with a red pushpin. The red pushpin is automatically inserted by the Twitter add-in when the Geo API is used in the tweet. Other posts may still have a location associated with them, but these red pins specifically indicate those coming from an app using the Twitter Geo API.
Knowing this we can now search for all crimes reported from this particular user to get details about crimes in Alexandria, Virginia. Here’s our choices in the Twitter add-in:
And here’s the results on our map. You can click any pushpin to see the tweet and learn more about the crime.
For more information you can search for other posts about the ArcGIS Explorer Twitter add-in.
