eSMS - a Semantics-assisted Emergency Information System Based on Social Media

Abstract

— Natural and man-made disasters pose an ever-present threat to our society. Providing real time information is vital in emergency management. Current disaster information systems only use and manage relatively limited information, such as, within an organization or with a few organizations which have an agreement on information content and format. As a result, a large amount of potentially precious information and natural volunteer workers are ignored. On the other hand, social media have been used by people to propagate emergent situations. Therefore, in this project, we aim to maximally utilize all of the available emergency-related information from various sources of social media to better manage natural and man-made disasters. In particular, we propose a semantics-extended social search engine that can fetch highly relevant information from social media for emergency management purpose.