Generic Architecture of a Social Media-driven Intervention Support System for Smart Cities

With the growing adoption of Internet and mobile technology, the information exchange via social media has greatly influenced both government and corporate operations. Social Media has not only become a platform for mere entertainment and communication but a great source of innovation for public services. While millions of users generate data on these social media platforms everyday, the challenge is to effectively extract and analyze information from the big social data in a productive manner for improving public services of future smart and connected communities. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of creating an Intervention Support System (ISS) interface for public services of a city to easily and effectively monitor attitude trends of public for topics of interest (e.g., a cleanliness awareness campaign), while hiding all the complex functionality of collecting, processing, and mining big user-generated data from social media. We first discuss the generic architecture of ISS and its various components, followed by demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed architecture via an application design to identify intervention targets on social networks for supporting public campaigns against the key societal crisis of gender-based violence. We conclude with the challenges, limitations, and future work direction to effectively assist future smart city services via big data analytics approaches.