Social Sensing: A New Approach to Understanding Our Socioeconomic Environments

The emergence of big data brings new opportunities for us to understand our socioeconomic environments. We use the term social sensing for such individual-level big geospatial data and the associated analysis methods. The word sensing suggests two natures of the data. First, they can be viewed as the analogue and complement of remote sensing, as big data can capture well socioeconomic features while conventional remote sensing data do not have such privilege. Second, in social sensing data, each individual plays the role of a sensor. This article conceptually bridges social sensing with remote sensing and points out the major issues when applying social sensing data and associated analytics. We also suggest…