A framework for annotating OpenStreetMap objects using geo-tagged tweets

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of geospatial data, especially in the form of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). As a prominent example, OpenStreetMap (OSM) creates a free editable map of the world from a large number of contributors. On the other hand, social media platforms such as Twitter or Instagram supply dynamic social feeds at population level. As much of such data is geo-tagged, there is a high potential on integrating social media with OSM to enrich OSM with semantic annotations, which will complement existing objective description oriented annotations to provide a broader range of annotations. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework on integrating social media data and VGI data to derive knowledge about geographical objects, specifically, top relevant annotations from tweets for objects in OSM. We first integrate geo-tagged tweets with OSM data with scalable spatial queries running on MapReduce. We propose a frequency based method for annotating boundary based geographic objects (a polygon), and a probability based method for annotating point based geographic objects (Latitude and Longitude), with consideration of noise. We evaluate our methods using a large geo-tagged tweets corpus and representative geographic objects from OSM, which demonstrates promising results through ground-truth comparison and case studies. We are able to produce up to 80% correct names for geographical objects and discover implicitly relevant information, such as popular exhibitions of a museum, the nicknames or visitors’ impression to a tourism attraction.