Mapping information of fire events, from VGI source (Twitter), for effective disaster management (in Greece); the fire of north-east Attica, august 2017, (Greece) case study

Abstract

This article introduced a novel method for mapping information related to fire events, from a source of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and from Twitter, in particular. As a case study, the fire of North East Attica (August 2017, Greece), was used. The fire event resulted in the burn of 15,000 decares of woodland. Moreover, state of emergency was declared in the region and thousands of citizens who were in the middle of summer vacations were incited to leave from the area of Kalamos, even if they were located at the coastal part. Regarding the methodology, as a first step, all the tweets that were published within 168 h of the fire event and contain relevant information, were collected. Next, they were classified into certain groups the most important ofwhich are: (i) to information regarding fire event tracking, (ii) to the tracking of the consequences and (iii) to the simple identification of the fire event. The geo-referencing of the classified information is performed by using a script written in R. The final output consisted of thematic maps that visualize the classified information.