Enriching Digital Libraries with Crowdsensed Data: Twitter Monitor and the SoBigData Ecosystem

SoBigData is a Research Infrastructure (RI) aiming to provide an integrated ecosystem for ethic-sensitive scientific discoveries and advanced applications of social data mining. A key milestone of the project focuses on data, methods and results sharing, in order to ensure the reproducibility, review and re-use of scientific works. For this reason, the Digital Library paradigm is implemented within the RI, providing users with virtual environments where datasets, methods and results can be collected, maintained, managed and preserved, granting full documentation, access and the possibility to re-use. In this paper, we describe the results of our effort for integrating the Twitter Monitor, a tool for gathering messages from the Twitter Online Social Network, into the SoBigData RI. The Twitter Monitor provides a simple user interface, enabling researchers and stakeholders, without programming skills, to seamlessly (i) select relevant messages out of the huge Twitter stream by means of language, keyword, user tracking and geographical filters, (ii) store data on user personal Workspace, (iii) and publish them in the SoBigData Resource Catalogue, which implements all the aforementioned Digital Library features. Thanks to the seamless integration in the SoBigData RI, the Twitter Monitor allows researchers and stakeholders, belonging to different areas and having different backgrounds, to exploit the crowdsensing paradigm for enriching the SoBigData Digital Library. In this way, crowdsensing acquires the key features of openness, accessibility, interoperability and interdisciplinarity that characterize the Digital Libraries framework.