Events and news stories generate a massive amount of social media attention. Whether it's something as important as a natural disaster or there is social strife or something purely for entertainment, there is a large volume of information that needs to be mined. As GIS practitioners, we are primarily interested in geographic analysis, and some social media channels provide geographic context related to their information streams. For example, Twitter users can make their tweets location-enabled. Location-enabled Twitter accounts will ensure that each tweet will be tagged with the current geographic coordinates of the user. Many Twitter users have not made their accounts location-enabled due to security reasons or because they are unaware of this feature or are simply not interested. In fact, only about 2% of tweets contain location information.
The application built in this chapter will mine a live stream of tweets...