Sentiment Analysis and Mapping for Next-Gen ITS

The recent increase in new transportation data sources coupled with the enhanced densities of data sources are leading to a number of new analytics tools for transportation professionals.  One of the latest analysis resources to recently emerge fuses real-time/near-real time social data with traditional mobility data (speed, location, trajectory).  Human sensor networks wield a much more comprehensive ability to not only report on traditional mobility data attributes, but also provides additional resolution for location and time, as well as characteristics with regards to “sentiment”.

Sentiment analysis  aggregates and filters real-time data from the web and social media resources and reduces the data for context and transportation value.  Sentiment mapping links data sources with location, or future locations with detected sentiment related to each location.     For example, data crawlers and filtering for key words (accident, crash, traffic, I-66, I-95) and assessing sentiment tied to messages (slow, clear, backup, bad, good).  The resulting sentiment model is then tied to time and location data for a resulting sentiment graph.  Sentiment mapping and sentiment analysis can also be utilized for predictive analytics where content is determined to identify future location-based sentiment for future conditions.

The following links provide a primer as well as preliminary information on development and configuration of sentiment data models.

References and Resources

How Social Media Can Improve and Redesign Transport Systems
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/social-media-redesign-transport-systems-cities
Transportation Sentiment Analysis for Safety Enhancement
http://utc.ices.cmu.edu/utc/CMU%20Reports%202013%202/Final%20Report%20Chen.pdf
Creating a Sentiment Analysis Model
https://developers.google.com/prediction/docs/sentiment_analysis
Sentiment Analysis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis
How Smart Cities are Using API’s
http://www.programmableweb.com/news/how-smart-cities-are-using-apis-public-transport-apis/2014/05/22