A Twitter-Based Disaster Information Sharing System

Abstract

To minimize damage during disasters, the rapid collection and delivery of accurate information are essential. Because of this, the potentiality of Twitter in disaster response efforts has received significant attention worldwide. Location information, such as geotags (longitude and latitude data) and street addresses in posted tweets have the potential to provide useful information during disasters, however, few tweets currently include geotags, and it may be difficult for users to accurately insert the addresses of their current position in their tweets. With these points in mind, our previous study discussed the implementation of a Twitter-based disaster-related information-sharing system that adds geo-information to tweets. That system was launched around the middle of Feb. 2015 and has been in continuous operation since that time. However, since we consider it to be desirable for disaster-information systems to be as simple as possible, in this paper we will report on the implementation of a new real-time disaster-related information-sharing system that is more user-friendly than the previous system.