A conceptual framework for developing solutions that organise social media information for emergency response teams

ABSTRACT

Social media have great power to spread information, and this is particularly noticeable when an emergency occurs. The extraction of accurate information from social media can offer an important resource for emergency management, both in terms of decision-making and increasing situational awareness. This paper describes a conceptual framework for the development of applications to treat messages from social media. It is designed to select, classify and prioritise, using parameters, messages containing information that is relevant to the emergency context. It allows a team to act on this information and to generate rescue actions that contribute to the emergency solution. It has a collaborative bias, providing perceptual, coordination and communication mechanisms. We also present an instantiation and the simulation of its use in the treatment of tweets (Twitter messages) about two emergencies: an earthquake in Mexico City (19/09/2017) and a California fire (December, 2017). The volume of messages is enormous, but most of them do not present significant value to the emergency response. We categorised those that contained relevant information. With only 2% of the tweets, it was possible to identify and prioritise messages with potential to aid in response and rescue operations.

KEYWORDS:

• Emergency
• emergency response
• situational awareness
• social media
• conceptual framework

Acknowledgements

Paulo V. R. de Carvalho and Marcos R. S. Borges gratefully acknowledge the support of Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas (CNPq).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Danilo P. Freitas http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8759-8719

Additional information

Funding

The work of Marcos R.S. Borges has been supported by FAPERJ under [grant number E-26/202.876/2018].