On the challenges of using social media for crisis management

Abstract

In crisis situations, the challenge of understanding the current situation is tightly linked to the ability to process the variety and the amount of information provided by the multiple sources. In particular, social media can provide additional insight on real-time events, providing that the information that they relay is accurately retrieved, evaluated, and fused. In this chapter, we describe various mechanisms and functions necessary for information fusion and understanding, starting from social media exploration and retrieval, then describing the fusion process and the associated management of information uncertainty, concluding with a description of the methodology and experiments we use to tackle the intrinsic big volume of data and processing required for social media information analysis.