Analyzing the effect of earthquakes on OpenStreetMap contribution patterns and tweeting activities

ABSTRACT

Natural disasters, such as wildfires, earthquakes, landslides, or floods, lead to an increase in topical information shared on social media and in increased mapping activities in volunteered geographic information (VGI) platforms. Using earthquakes in Nepal and Central Italy as case studies, this research analyzes the effects of natural disasters on short-term (weeks) and longer-term (half year) changes in OpenStreetMap (OSM) mapping behavior and tweet activities in the affected regions. An increase of activities in OSM during the events can be partially attributed to those focused OSM mapping campaigns, for example, through the Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT). Using source tags in OSM change-sets, it was found that only a small portion of external mappers actually travels to the affected regions, whereas the majority of external mappers relies on desktop mapping instead. Furthermore, the study analyzes the spatio-temporal sequence of posted tweets together with keyword filters to identify a subset of users who most likely traveled to the affected regions for support and rescue operations. It also explores where, geographically, earthquake information spreads within social networks.

KEYWORDS:

• Volunteered geographic information (VGI)
• OpenStreetMap (OSM)
• Twitter
• natural disaster
• human dynamics

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ahmed Ahmouda

Ahmed Ahmouda is a PhD candidate and graduate assistant in the Geomatics Program, University of Florida. In his research, he analyzes how political and natural crises affect contribution patterns to crowd-sourced data platforms and social media activities. He received his master’s degree in Geographic Information Systems from the University of Redlands, California.

Hartwig H. Hochmair

Hartwig Hochmair is an associate professor of Geomatics at the University of Florida where he teaches courses in GIS, digital mapping, adjustment computations, and geodesy. In his research, he focuses on the quality assessment of crowd-sourced geo-data, and the analysis of transportation networks and travel behavior with a focus on bicycle and public transportation. He obtained his PhD degree in Geographic Information Science from the Technical University of Vienna, Austria.

Sreten Cvetojevic

Sreten Cvetojevic is a PhD candidate from the Geomatics Program at the University of Florida. His research evolves around information propagation in social networks, including Twitter. He obtained his master’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Belgrade, Serbia.