innovative approaches to using social media for events such as earthquakes, floods, and tornadoes to both inform the public and assist civil protection authorities in focusing response efforts. 1 During recent natural disaster events, such as the Haiti earthquake and Russian wildfires in 2010, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and the 2013 tornado in Oklahoma, humanitarian organizations and networks of volunteers have set up live Web-based manual crisis mapping sites. 1 These organizations check and filter crowdsourced information from news reports, social media, and civil protection agency alerts, and present it live on Web-based crisis maps for the general public to see. Challenges for these organizations include automating the huge task of real-time data fusion of large volumes of multisource heterogeneous information and maintaining the trust and credibility of this data. 1 We've developed a real-time crisis-mapping platform capable of geoparsing tweet content. Our approach exploits readily available location information from gazetteers, street maps, and volunteered geographic information (VGI) sources. Our goal is to improve geoparsing precision of street-level tweet incident reports and empirically quantify the accuracy of the resulting social media crisis maps during natural disaster events. To our knowledge, this is the first published analysis to directly compare street-level Twitterbased crisis maps to a verified ground truth based on post-event expert assessment. Such results can help disaster management agencies assess the value of social media crisis mapping. Current real-time geospatial information systems (GIS) mostly map social media microblog reports using geotag metadata with longitude/latitude coordinates. 2 This approach turns social media into a crowdsourcing virtual sensor network, allowing maps of Twitter messages to be plotted. According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), the main W ith the ubiquity of mobile communication devices, people experiencing natural disaster events can publish microblogs, images, and videos in real time on social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, often live and in situ. In the humanitarian sector, this has sparked great interest in developing
Another work towards this direction is that of REF , where the authors present a social media crisis mapping platform for natural disasters by using statistical analysis techniques for generating real-time crisis maps.
Real-Time Crisis Mapping of Natural Disasters Using Social Media
IEEE Intelligent Systems
IEEE Intelligent Systems
Computer Science