Semi-Automatic Alerts and Notifications for Emergency Services based on Cross-Platform Social Media Data - Evaluation of a Prototype

The convergence of social networking and mobile media technology is shifting the way how people communicate and gain or share information. People are using social media to a greater extent, also in emergency situations. During disasters throughout the world, such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the 2013 European floods, or the terror attacks 2015 in Paris and 2016 in Brussels, this has been illustrated again. Often information about disasters even finds its way faster to social media than it reaches regular news companies and emergency services. However, approaches for processing and analyzing the vast quantities of data produced have even more potential. Yet many emergency services still have not found a way to put this potential to an effective use. Within our project EmerGent we are developing a system to process and analyse information from social media particularly tailored for the specific needs of emergency services. The aim is to transform the high volume of noisy data into a low volume of rich content that is useful to emergency personnel. In the first part of this paper we present our approach from a user interface perspective. The second part deals with the evaluation of the approach and the derivation of future potentials of the approach.