Disaster situation report based on general public response: A standardization perspective

Taiwan is located in an area often struck by natural disasters like typhoon or earthquake. To enablethe general public aware of the coming threats of hazards, the disaster relief agencies are required to monitor thecontinuously changing situations and provide prompt warnings and immediate help to the disaster sites. The sourceof hazard information may widely include individual agencies' own systems, sensor web, IoT devices, exchange withother agencies or even social media (e.g., Facebook) and citizens. The content may be as simple as a photo with afew words or as complex as integrated reports about the hazard information of a region. The past practices oftenrequire a tremendous volume of manual operations to overcome the heterogeneity b arriers, and even extra edition tomake the acquired data (e.g., geotagging the photo) good for response decision making. An effective mechanism istherefore desperately necessary for improving the efficiency for automatically handling the variety types of hazardinformation from different resources in a timely manner. Social media has become an increasingly important sourcefor collecting and updating the real-time disaster situations. This paper examines the requirement and processingstrategies of hazard information collected from the general public and compare the results with the governments'hazard information. We the summarize the feasibility of distributing parsed information according to the frameworkin the EDXL Situation Report standard. As the EDXL SitRep standard can suffice the needs for further exchanginginformation between different agencies, the results can contribute to expand the capability of taking advantages ofthe extraordinary valuable information from the general public for better emergency response and recovery.