An Online Supporting Scheme for Monitoring Disaster Events

Abstract

Disasters and emergencies including traffic accidents fire and earthquakes can cause property damage loss of lives and economic damages Nevertheless one of the most difficult tasks for agencies in disaster management is to rapidly and accurately identify the latest status of a disaster event In view of this it is noted that witnesses of a disaster event send instant messages on the social media so as to contact their families and friends post photos and share stories Such a way is usually much faster than the news reporting on conventional media Specifically social media has played an important role in spreading information of disaster events by enabling people to share and ask for help In this work we thus propose an online supporting scheme to monitor and track disaster events Invaluable clues embedded in huge amounts of online messages can be discovered with an appropriately supporting scheme when carefully exploiting the information over content temporal and social dimensions Specifically multiple data sources are crawled from social networks to conduct real-time analysis and to present interactive visualization Experimental studies show that the proposed scheme is feasible for agencies in practical usage

Date of Award	2017 Aug 31
Original language	English
Supervisor	Wei-Guang Teng (Supervisor)