Mining open and crowdsourced data to improve situational awareness for railway

This paper describes on-going research developing a system to harvest and utilise open and crowdsourced data related to the UK railway systems. This system will allow the controllers and decision makers to listen to the messages posted on social networks by passengers or other members of the public and relate these messages to specific (physical) trains that are referred to in those messages, by fusing information from other open sources. This will enable the railway controllers to take prompt actions in case of any emergency or simply to improve the quality of customer service.