Collaborative, Open Source Migration Data and Modeling Research Platform

An open source migration data repository and modeling research platform is built to facilitate the modeling of migration patterns. Cross-disciplinary collaboration is supported in this research platform by providing a centralized location for researchers to store and retrieve historical data and models, as well as to have access to computational analysis and information visualization tools tailored to migration causal modeling and pattern analysis. The Phase I effort focuses on the collection and analysis of two leading indicators of migration (1) aviation-related data, and (2) Twitter message scraping for migration movement data. These datasets are representative of traditional structured (aviation) and unstructured (social media) datasets. By demonstrating how these data may provide predictive information about migration trends and anomalies for small set of international scenarios of interest, the lessons learned from this analysis will guide the design of the research platform. Follow on phases will then address additional widely-diverse structured and unstructured datasets, research platform features and functions that support cross-disciplinary collaboration, and analysis tools and visualization capabilities that encourage a diverse community of scientists, policymakers, and OSD (as well as other) decision makers to make data driven, optimized, and well-informed decisions.