Integration and dissemination of citizen reported and seismically derived earthquake information via social network technologies

Abstract

People in the locality of earthquakes are publishing anecdotal information about the shaking within seconds of their occurrences via social network technologies, such as Twitter. In contrast, depending on the size and location of the earthquake, scientific alerts can take between two to twenty minutes to publish. We describe TED (Twitter Earthquake Detector) a system that adopts social network technologies to augment earthquake response products and the delivery of hazard information. The TED system analyzes data from these social networks for multiple purposes: 1) to integrate citizen reports of earthquakes with corresponding scientific reports 2) to infer the public level of interest in an earthquake for tailoring outputs disseminated via social network technologies and 3) to explore the possibility of rapid detection of a probable earthquake, within seconds of its occurrence, helping to fill the gap between the earthquake origin time and the presence of quantitative scientific data. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.