The use of Big Data in studying migration routes: new tools and applications

In an age where people flee from their countries of origin due to the worsening of conflicts and wars, of political crisis and violence, of terrorism, of religious radicalization processes, and persecutions, policy making needs to be based on a wider and more sensible information systems. Population censuses, sample surveys as well as administrative archives and registers are revealing some critical issues that could be partly overcome by the enormous informative potential offered by new sources and Big Data (Rango, 2014; De Backer, 2014). In this chapter, starting from the main results of a Eurostat project on the “Standardization and geocoding of migration flows”, granted to the Italian Institute of Statistics, some innovative tools and applications will be described. Moreover, in light of some interesting questions raised in occasion of a conclusive workshop on “Studying Migration Routes: New Data and Tools” (http://www.istat.it/it/archivio/186849), the innovative use of some technologies, such as the mobile phone tracking, the processing of satellite images and finally the extraction of information from social networks, will be described in depth.