38,100 research outputs found
Crisis Analytics: Big Data Driven Crisis Response
Disasters have long been a scourge for humanity. With the advances in
technology (in terms of computing, communications, and the ability to process
and analyze big data), our ability to respond to disasters is at an inflection
point. There is great optimism that big data tools can be leveraged to process
the large amounts of crisis-related data (in the form of user generated data in
addition to the traditional humanitarian data) to provide an insight into the
fast-changing situation and help drive an effective disaster response. This
article introduces the history and the future of big crisis data analytics,
along with a discussion on its promise, challenges, and pitfalls
Social Media for Cities, Counties and Communities
Social media (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) and other tools and services with user- generated content have made a staggering amount of information (and misinformation) available. Some government officials seek to leverage these resources to improve services and communication with citizens, especially during crises and emergencies. Yet, the sheer volume of social data streams generates substantial noise that must be filtered. Potential exists to rapidly identify issues of concern for emergency management by detecting meaningful patterns or trends in the stream of messages and information flow. Similarly, monitoring these patterns and themes over time could provide officials with insights into the perceptions and mood of the community that cannot be collected through traditional methods (e.g., phone or mail surveys) due to their substantive costs, especially in light of reduced and shrinking budgets of governments at all levels. We conducted a pilot study in 2010 with government officials in Arlington, Virginia (and to a lesser extent representatives of groups from Alexandria and Fairfax, Virginia) with a view to contributing to a general understanding of the use of social media by government officials as well as community organizations, businesses and the public. We were especially interested in gaining greater insight into social media use in crisis situations (whether severe or fairly routine crises, such as traffic or weather disruptions)
On Identifying Disaster-Related Tweets: Matching-based or Learning-based?
Social media such as tweets are emerging as platforms contributing to
situational awareness during disasters. Information shared on Twitter by both
affected population (e.g., requesting assistance, warning) and those outside
the impact zone (e.g., providing assistance) would help first responders,
decision makers, and the public to understand the situation first-hand.
Effective use of such information requires timely selection and analysis of
tweets that are relevant to a particular disaster. Even though abundant tweets
are promising as a data source, it is challenging to automatically identify
relevant messages since tweet are short and unstructured, resulting to
unsatisfactory classification performance of conventional learning-based
approaches. Thus, we propose a simple yet effective algorithm to identify
relevant messages based on matching keywords and hashtags, and provide a
comparison between matching-based and learning-based approaches. To evaluate
the two approaches, we put them into a framework specifically proposed for
analyzing disaster-related tweets. Analysis results on eleven datasets with
various disaster types show that our technique provides relevant tweets of
higher quality and more interpretable results of sentiment analysis tasks when
compared to learning approach
empathi: An ontology for Emergency Managing and Planning about Hazard Crisis
In the domain of emergency management during hazard crises, having sufficient
situational awareness information is critical. It requires capturing and
integrating information from sources such as satellite images, local sensors
and social media content generated by local people. A bold obstacle to
capturing, representing and integrating such heterogeneous and diverse
information is lack of a proper ontology which properly conceptualizes this
domain, aggregates and unifies datasets. Thus, in this paper, we introduce
empathi ontology which conceptualizes the core concepts concerning with the
domain of emergency managing and planning of hazard crises. Although empathi
has a coarse-grained view, it considers the necessary concepts and relations
being essential in this domain. This ontology is available at
https://w3id.org/empathi/
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