Contextual analysis of the victims' social network for people recommendation on the emergency scenario

Abstract

The growing use of mobile devices by the population and the high popularity of the social media in current society, such as Facebook and Twitter, produces more and more information, plenty of them with contextual data. One of the major obstacles to the emergency response team during the response phase of emergency management is to obtain information that could lead to solving a particular situation involving emergency victims. In this paper we present a proposal which aims to collect information from social media and mobile devices, identify the contextual information and analyze them to indicate people who could help in the identification of victims. This work focuses on identifying the social network of victims and look for people who can provide important and reliable information about them, thus assisting the emergency team in its work. We use this contextual information to improve the recommendation process, identifying people with high degree of closeness. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.