Riskr: a web 2.0 platform to monitor and share disaster information (original) (raw)
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Riskr: A low-technological Web2.0 disaster service to monitor and share information
2012
Disaster management using the World Wide Web is an emergent field that uses technology to enhance user collaboration around disasters. While there exist a number of dedicated 'disaster portals', large social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, can facilitate the analysis and sharing of a collective intelligence regarding disaster information on a far greater scale. Social networks have the potential to increase accessibility to, and the use of a disaster portal. This paper presents the ‘Riskr’ project, which applies a low-technological solution to creating disaster portals fed by social networking messages, and the strategies used in its development. The system has been implemented using Twitter and tested by users to determine whether there is merit in having interoperability between social networks and disaster portals. Preliminary results suggest there is some benefit in using Twitter as a middleware between users and the implemented disaster service. A usability study showed that 70.5% of the users were able to estimate the location of a disaster within a certain error margin. Furthermore, 95% of users were able to successfully adapt to using the system. The results from the Riskr project suggest that the combination of online services and interoperability between disaster portals and social networks can further enhance disaster management initiatives.
Social Networks and Information Dissemination for Disaster Risk Management
E-based systems and computer networks are becoming standard practice across all sectors, including health, engineering, business, education, security, and citizen interaction with local and national government. They facilitate rapid and easy dissemination of information and data to assist service providers and end-users, offering existing and newly engineered services, products, and communication channels. Recent years have witnessed rising interest in these computerized systems and procedures, which exploit different forms of electronic media in order to offer effective and sophisticated solutions to a wide range of real-world applications.
Social Media for Disaster Awareness and Management
Environmental Awareness and the Role of Social Media, 2019
Social media has redefined crisis management in the recent years. Extraction of situation awareness information from social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. is a non-trivial task once the required framework is established. Unfortunately, most public safety authorities are still suspicious of using social media in engaging and disseminating information. This chapter reports on how social media can be effectively used in the field of emergency management along with the opportunities and challenges put forth. The chapter starts with a discussion on the functions of social media and its trustworthiness. It provides a description of the framework for disaster management system and the methodology to be adopted. The methodology consists of volunteer classification, methods of data collection, challenges faced, event detection, and data characterization with currently available disaster management tools. The chapter concludes with the division between practice and research and moves toward envisioning how social media may be used as a resource in emergency management.
Social Media in Disaster Management
Provision of an accurate and timely disaster relief effort requires an insightful informational coverage of a crisis situation. Social media has a potential of providing a large amount of information generated by people about different aspects of a certain crisis situation. However, emergency-oriented social media utilization is still at an embryonic stage of its understanding. So, in this report 10 research studies were reviewed in an attempt to gain some understanding about this approach. As it appeared, crowdsourced information allows to get a versatile and insightful understanding of a crisis situation, but, as with any Big Data, there are major challenges of making use of high volumes of diverse information, in terms of extraction and representation of relevant and accurate information. Furthermore, other research studies proposed extraction/representation techniques which were primarily aimed at thematic and geographical clustering of information. As it appeared from the real cases of social media application during emergencies, there is still no standardized approach on how such information can be handled, but in those cases, emergency responders still managed to successfully apply their own methods of primarily geographical and thematic clustering of information, while still being greatly challenged by overwhelming amount of user-generated information. Thus, the success could perhaps be explained by social media being used primarily as a complement/enhancement of other already proved to be effective techniques. Further exploration would be needed in order to gain a more complete understanding of the current state emergency-oriented social media utilization, which could later be used as a theoretical framework for a new research study in this area.
Use of Social Media in Natural Disaster Management
The possibilities for the use of social media in the management of natural disasters are discussed in the paper. A brief overview of natural disasters is given. The term social media is defined and their basic functions and components are described. Communication types and the means for their implementation between participants in natural disaster events are analyzed. Basic guidelines for organizing information exchange by social media are proposed.
Open Geosciences, 2019
Social networking sites (SNS) became an indispensable part of people’s everyday life, but also a powerful tool of communication during urgent situations, such as during natural disasters. This is evidenced by a large number of research papers showing the use of SNS in difficult circumstances. Some of the ways of using are the dissemination of information about missing persons, warning on further possible consequences, safety checks during natural disasters, communication about places where the population can find help or a safe refuge. At the same time, SNS could increase awareness among the population about natural hazards. Unfortunately, most parts of the world have at least once been hit by a major natural disaster. People who manage such events have a big task in front of them, as they need to exploit the potential of SNS, but also to reduce the negative side, such as spreading inaccurate information in difficult moments. The paper presents ways of using SNS, and the positive an...
Harnessing Twitter and Instagram for disaster management
IBM Journal of Research and Development, 2017
Social media has become a critical source of information for the public, government authorities, and other stakeholders both during and after large-scale emergencies. However, the sheer volume of data and the low signal-to-noise ratio, with respect to information, limit the effectiveness and the efficiency of using social media as an intelligence resource. In this paper, we describe Australian Crisis Tracker (ACT), a tool designed to facilitate the understanding of critical information available in social media channels for people and agencies responding to natural disasters. ACT harnesses the Twitter streaming application program interface by processing each tweet through a pipeline of analytic components, including filtering, metadata parsing, image extraction, and clustering of relevant tweets into events. Each of these events is then geocoded, categorized, and augmented with images from Instagram. The pipeline of these analytics is coupled to a web-user interface that allows stakeholders to better access information during natural disasters. In this paper, we describe the ACT pipeline, analytics, and pilot by the Australian Red Cross during the 2013-2014 Australian bushfire season.
Pulling Information from social media in the aftermath of unpredictable disasters
2015 2nd International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Disaster Management (ICT-DM), 2015
Social media have become a primary communication channel among people and are continuously overwhelmed by huge volumes of User Generated Content. This is especially true in the aftermath of unpredictable disasters, when users report facts, descriptions and photos of the unfolding event. This material contains actionable information that can greatly help rescuers to achieve a better response to crises, but its volume and variety render manual processing unfeasible. This paper reports the experience we gained from developing and using a web-enabled system for the online detection and monitoring of unpredictable events such as earthquakes and floods. The system captures selected message streams from Twitter and offers decision support functionalities for acquiring situational awareness from textual content and for quantifying the impact of disasters. The software architecture of the system is described and the approaches adopted for messages filtering, emergency detection and emergency monitoring are discussed. For each module, the results of real-world experiments are reported. The modular design makes the system easy configurable and allowed us to conduct experiments on different crises, including Emilia earthquake in 2012 and Genoa flood in 2014. Finally, some possible functionalities relying on the analysis of multimedia information are introduced.
Integrating Social Media Communications into the Rapid Assessment of Sudden Onset Disasters
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014
Recent research on automatic analysis of social media data during disasters has given insight into how to provide valuable and timely information to formal response agencies-and members of the public-in these safety-critical situations. For the most part, this work has followed a bottom-up approach in which data are analyzed first, and the target audience's needs are addressed later. Here, we adopt a top-down approach in which the starting point are information needs. We focus on the aid agency tasked with coordinating humanitarian response within the United Nations: OCHA, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. When disasters occur, OCHA must quickly make decisions based on the most complete picture of the situation they can obtain. They are responsible for organizing search and rescue operations, emergency food assistance, and similar tasks. Given that complete knowledge of any disaster event is not possible, they gather information from myriad available sources, including social media. In this paper, we examine the rapid assessment procedures used by OCHA, and explain how they executed these procedures during the 2013 Typhoon Yolanda. In addition, we interview a small sample of OCHA employees, focusing on their uses and views of social media data. In addition, we show how state-of-the-art social media processing methods can be used to produce information in a format that takes into account what large international humanitarian organizations require to meet their constantly evolving needs.
Twitter turns ten: its use to date in disaster management
This article explores current literature to identify the main uses of Twitter in emergency management over the past ten years in Australia and overseas. It finds several uses across the 'disaster cycle' including as a medium for identifying hazard risk, community engagement for disaster mitigation and preparedness, early warning communication, crowdsourcing to provide real-time information, emotional support, identifying needs and vulnerabilities of affected communities, and allocating resources during recovery. This paper concludes by examining some relatively untapped uses of Twitter in building disaster resilience including for social capital formation, capacity building, disaster virtual communities-of-practice, and social change.