Esri and Geofeedia announced plans to extend the ArcGIS platform with Geofeedia’s innovative social media tools. Public safety professionals will be able to take advantage of these capabilities to accurately integrate, monitor, analyze, and visualize live emergency data as events unfold. Deploying assets and personnel, understanding of events on the ground, adjusting response on the fly, and post-event monitoring are all improved using social media combined with location analytics.
"Geofeedia is an innovator in location-based social media," says Ryan Lanclos, emergency management manager, Esri. "Both organizations recognized that understanding location provides context and value to social media. Ultimately, this improves meeting mission demands.”
“Esri is an industry leader and provides the ideal enterprise platform to visualize and analyze real-time social media feeds from Geofeedia,” says Phil Harris, CEO of Geofeedia. “Location-based social media data layers from Geofeedia combined with Esri’s technology and vast repository of other layers give public safety officials the best combination of real-time intelligence for response efforts.”
The real-time data integration, searching and streaming will work across multiple social media platforms including Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, and Picasa. Geo-located tweets, photos, and videos can be viewed within the context of digital imagery, street networks, topography, and community base maps. The social data can be mashed up with other information such as public safety assets, city infrastructure, utility networks, hazardous materials, demographic data, and more. Additional dynamic data including weather, automated vehicle location, GPS, and traffic video camera feeds can be combined with social and map data. In addition, people can perform historical social media analysis to identify trends and patterns.
In addition to public safety, professionals in government, national security, healthcare, and insurance will be able to extend the ArcGIS platform by adding intelligence about social conversations. This includes social media sentiment, location, population profile, and temporal and spatial trend analysis. Adding intelligence improves security, crisis response and business continuity, event monitoring, marketing, compliance, and more.
The integration was demonstrated at the Esri Partner Conference in Palm Springs, California March 23–26. Esri and Geofeedia will release more details at the Esri User Conference in July.