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Early Warning and Outbreak Detection Using Social Networking Websites: The Potential of Twitter

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Abstract

Epidemic Intelligence is being used to gather information about potential diseases outbreaks from both formal and increasingly informal sources. A potential addition to these informal sources are social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. In this paper we describe a method for extracting messages, called “tweets” from the Twitter website and the results of a pilot study which collected over 135,000 tweets in a week during the current Swine Flu pandemic.

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References

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© 2010 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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de Quincey, E., Kostkova, P. (2010). Early Warning and Outbreak Detection Using Social Networking Websites: The Potential of Twitter. In: Kostkova, P. (eds) Electronic Healthcare. eHealth 2009. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 27. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11745-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11745-9_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-11744-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-11745-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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