DETECTING EVENTS IN EGYPT BASED ON GEO-REFERENCED TWEETS

Migration is a major challenge of many European member states, early preparedness is imperative for target states for multiple reasons such as provision of adequate search and rescue measures. Specific events such as natural disasters might be in some cases the reason for increased communication by the crowd as well as early indicators of developing migration flows. In order to identify such indicators, we investigated the daily number of geo referenced Tweets in Egypt during the period from October 2013 until March 2014 by using the data handling tool Ubicity. Moreover, we identified certain days where relevant political events have taken place in order to identify possible event triggered changes of the daily number of Tweets. In addition, we extracted the daily number of Tweets in the big cities Cairo and Alexandria. We observed an increase of the daily numbers of Tweets during the period of ostracism of the political party "Muslim Brotherhood". The largest number of daily Tweets was observed that day, when a rare snowstorm occurred in Egypt. We found good correlation between the number of Tweets in the whole Egypt and those of the two cities Cairo and Alexandria.