Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 14.1
Number of UGC
harvested from social
networks in different
experiments
City
From date
To date
No. of UGC
London
Jan. 1st 2011
Feb. 1st 2011
5,143,500
Rome
Oct. 15th 2011
Oct. 16th 2011
91,538
Turin
Aug. 1st 2011
Sept. 20th 2011
240,982
Berlin
Jan. 4th 2012
Jan. 20th 2012
1,699,240
Hong Kong
May 1st 2012
Jul. 1st 2012
5,732,487
Cairo
Jul. 27th 2013
Sept. 2nd 2013
3,466,388
and shopping centers, we perceive them to be public spaces and, thus, we conform
to what we have learned to be our rights and acceptable behaviors in public
spaces. But this is not the case as different sets of rules apply in these spaces
affecting anything from privacy, freedom of expression and basic rights. We have
often clashed with this kind of issue, for example in trying to harvest all the user
expressions on their feelings towards public policies enacted by governments and
administrations.
That said, with the help of legal consultants we have managed to design
a replicable model which includes clusters of rules which transform the legal
specifications into technical and technological ones, and which we have been able
to successfully use in these kinds of scenarios over the past 3 years.
Some limitations exist on the purely technical side, too.
In the first instance, the APIs allow for limited degrees of freedom in the querying
and interaction with the databases of operators: not all of the information is made
available and limitations on how developers are able to formulate the queries also
exist.
Furthermore APIs frequently change, forcing development teams to constantly
maintain and adapt the source code of the applications.
Once in a while, entire sets of features and possibilities disappear or change in
form or availability, forcing designers and developers to go back to the drawing
board and re-think or re-frame their services.
It can be said that the ideas of access and of interoperability are currently not
among the priorities of social networking service providers.
We resolved most of these issues adopting a radically modular approach, using
interoperable connectors to take into account the different scenarios with the
different operators, and to abstract the main service logic from their implementation
details. And providing us with the possibility to limit the damages whenever ToS
or regulations changed on the operators' side. Table
14.1
shows the amount of
data which we were able to capture using these methods in various occasions and
experiments, across different cities.
This part of the activity has revealed to be a truly fundamental one, as we
have actually developed a service layer which implements an easily maintainable
abstraction and interoperability among different social network providers, and we're
thinking to dedicating to it a separate research effort, to design the ways in which it
could be offered as a service or as a novel source of real-time Open Data.
