Abstract
The Emergency Situation Awareness (ESA) system provides all-hazard situation awareness information for emergency managers using content gathered from the public Twitter API. It collects, filters and analyses Tweets from specific regions of interest in near-real-time, enabling effective alerting for unexpected incidents and monitoring of emergency events with results accessible via an interactive website.
ESA was developed in close collaboration with users to ensure fitness-for-purpose for the tasks performed by emergency services agencies. ESA processes large volumes of Twitter data and identifies discussion threads, trends and hot topics using language models. A burst detector generates alerts for unusually high frequency words that are filtered using text mining techniques and machine learning algorithms to identify Tweets of interest to emergency managers.
An overview of the ESA platform is presented along with example case studies of its use to detect earthquakes, identify bushfire events and provide all-hazard monitoring in a crisis coordination centre.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Abel, F., Hauff, C., Houben, G.-J., Stronkman, R., Tao, K.: Twitcident: fighting fire with information from social web streams. In: Proceedings of the 21st World Wide Web Conference, WWW (Companion Volume), pp. 305–308 (2012)
Anderson, M.: Integrating social media into traditional management command and control structures: the square peg into the round hole. In: Australian and New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference, pp. 18–34 (2012)
Bruns, A., Burgess, J., Crawford, K., Shaw, F.: #qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods (January 2012)
Chowdhury, S.R., Imran, M., Asghar, M.R., Amer-Yahia, S., Castillo, C.: Tweet4act: Using Incident-Specific Profiles for Classifying Crisis-Related Messages In: Proceedings of the 10th International ISCRAM Conference, Baden-Baden, Germany (May 2013)
Earle, P., Bowden, D., Guy, M.: Twitter earthquake detection: earthquake monitoring in a social world. Annals of GeoPhysics 54(6), 708–715 (2012)
Imran, M., Elbassuoni, S.H., Castillo, C., Diaz, F., Meier, P.: Extracting Information Nuggets from Disaster-Related Messages in Social Media. In: Proceedings of the 10th International ISCRAM Conference. Baden-Baden, Germany (May 2013)
Lindsay, B.: Social Media and Disasters: Current Uses, Future Options, and Policy Considerations (September 2011)
Power, R., Robinson, B., Ratcliffe, D.: Finding Fires with Twitter. In: Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA) Workshop, Brisbane, Australia. pp. 80–89 (2013)
Robinson, B., Power, R., Cameron, M.: An Evidence Based Earthquake Detector using Twitter. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Processing and Crisis Information (LPCI), Nagoya, Japan, pp. 1–9 (2013)
Sakaki, T., Okazaki, M., Matsuo, Y.: Earthquake Shakes Twitter Users: Real-time Event Detection by Social Sensors In: Proceedings of the 19th World Wide Web Conference. WWW, Raleigh, NC, USA, pp. 851–860 (2010)
Sakaki, T., Okazaki, M., Matsuo, Y.: Tweet Analysis for Real-Time Event Detection and Earthquake Reporting System Development. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 25(4), 919–931 (2013)
Verma, S., Vieweg, S., Corvey, W., Palen, L., Martin, J., Palmer, M., Schram, A., Anderson, K.: Natural Language Processing to the Rescue?: Extracting ‘Situational Awareness’ Tweets During Mass Emergency. In: Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), Barcelona, Spain, pp. 49–57 (July 2011)
Yin, J., Lampert, A., Cameron, M., Robinson, B., Power, R.: Using Social Media to Enhance Emergency Situation Awareness. IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol 27(6), 52–59 (2012)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Power, R., Robinson, B., Colton, J., Cameron, M. (2014). Emergency Situation Awareness: Twitter Case Studies. In: Hanachi, C., Bénaben, F., Charoy, F. (eds) Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management in Mediterranean Countries. ISCRAM-med 2014. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 196. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11818-5_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11818-5_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-11817-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-11818-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)