Harvard CGA Streaming Billion Geotweet Dataset

Funded by a grant from the Sloan Foundation, and with support from Massachusetts Open Cloud, the Center for Geographic Analysis(CGA) at Harvard developed a “big geodata”, remotely hosted, real-time-updated dataset which is a prototype for a new data type hosted outside Dataverse which supports streaming updates, and is accessed via an API. The CGA developed 1) the software and hardware platform to support interactive exploration of a billion spatio-temporal objects, nicknamed the "BOP" (billion object platform) 2) an API to provide query access to the archive from Dataverse 3) client-side tools for querying/visualizing the contents of the archive and extracting data subsets. This project is currently no longer active. For more information please see: http://gis.harvard.edu/services/project-consultation/project-resume/billion-object-platform-bop. “Geotweets” are tweets containing a GPS coordinate from the originating device. Currently 1-2% of tweets are geotweets, about 8 million per day. The CGA has been harvesting geotweets since 2012.