Using Analytics and Social Media for Monitoring and Mitigation of Social Disasters

Abstract

Public safety and emergency managementrequires tools that detect promptly the occurrence of emergencies and create a correct and detailed picture of the situation. Such tools may help alleviating desolation under harsh conditions related to natural or human-made disasters by fast and semi-automatic identification of the type, extent, place, intensity, and implications of the disaster.The research refers to the use of analytics to identify emergencies and recent disasters, based on social networks and media search, and direct relief proportional to the needs.We establish controlled vocabularies for a regional search (keywords to search in two languages) and propose ways to improve the search algorithms, and concepts and methods to interpret the findings.Several examples are discussed and conclusions are drawn.