[aprssig] APRS and Big Data

[K4FHK]

On Fri, 2016-12-30 at 12:39 -0500, Robert Bruninga wrote:
> APRS and its APRS-IS cloud are not being used to their full potential
> of
> “Big data”…


Indeed, there's plenty of data "stored" in the APRS-IS "cloud". And
that had me thinking of a new project a couple years ago. More below.




> The idea was, tune to 144.39, monitor for 10 minutes, and you would
> see
> everything going on in Ham radio in your area, on any and all bands
> and any
> and all activites, nets, frequencies,  contests, meetings, eyeballs,
> and
> what you were building, installing, whatever.  


Only if these are sent on RF. For APRS-IS only, mobile stations may not
get anything. (something my new project tries to solve)


> All we got instead, was a wasted decade of one-way GPS trackers with
> no one
> even looking at what was going on in their area.
> Are you doing something useful right now in Ham radio?  Are you
> beaconing
> it?


As you recall, I had built and announced a project that delivers
traffic accidents to mobile users via APRS. Folks in my area find it
very useful, and I believe it to be in the spirit of APRS.

Further, and I'm sure a lot of areas are covered, emergency weather
alerts are also being sent to APRS. Given that we're once again in
tornado season (we just had 6 touchdowns in MidTN a week ago), I
believe these to be useful as well, potentially life-saving.

Other folks may have other projects on RF. I think you'll find pockets
here and there with useful information on APRS, or novel uses of APRS.

(BTW: I really like the lightening strike project visible on Firenet.
Nicely done!)


> Anyway, what else can we do with “big data”?  I always wanted to
> write a
> “special event “ detector that would note any “convergence” of
> specialty
> mobiles in an area… thus, alerting one to an emergency response or
> something,…
> SO much fun… so little time…


Indeed! I was pondering the same thing a couple years ago, and hacked
together a new project. It's been live using my callsign, but I hadn't
gotten around to announce it yet, since, as you mentioned... "so little
time"!

Your post got me motivated to respond about my project, though. You
just asked what else is being done. Well, here is my response! :)
However, I will respond in a new email, in case there are replies to
it. Also, while it is using data collected from APRS-IS, I would not
consider it "big" data, at least no based on volume. But I'm sure
there's a lot of other data that can be accumulated and used. 

An event detector sounds interesting.... but of interest to who? Do you
want to watch for a given amount of stations in close proximity and
then... what? Message them all saying you're close to each other? :)
 Or just raise an alert in a ER/ECom center? 

There is a lot of data out there, but I think the challenging part is
doing something useful with that data. Well, I'll bite!

Watch for an email with subject "New Project:  WHERE-IS". It's
something I hacked together to try to make use of said big data. I'm
not sure how useful it is to others, but I'll leave you guys to be the
judge of that.

Cheers,
Frank