Bringing back shared knowledge about locations available through Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram to the physical space, the ‘Local Square Advisor’ project by MediaLAB Amsterdam is a social locative media visualisation tool for Urban Screens.

Informative tips and messages will be shown at relevant times, creating an alternative, crowdsourced “guide” of the Leidseplein area in Amsterdam.

The concept has been specifically designed for flexibility so it can be adapted to other screens and locations in the future. This has been achieved by splitting the application into a back-end and front-end.

The back-end gathers data through APIs, normalizes the data, links it to venues in the area and rates it on relevance. The front-end requests data from the back-end, and injects this dynamic data into a flash animation. The flash animation is a map, showing the local area with a route to the venue, and a panel showing the tip or tweet and other relevant metadata.