The Integration of Social Media Data in Emergency Management: an Innovative Decision Support System

The upsurge of social media platforms has opened to the prospect of integrating the information provided by citizens through these channels into the traditional emergency management process. This paper presents the Civil Protection Emergency System model designed for the Italo-Croatian decision support system developed in the Interreg project E-CITIJENS. Seismic, flood and forest fire are the risk typologies addressed. The model specifies the key steps that allow the system, a semantically enriched web-enabled platform, to identify and analyse significant social media posts that can provide Civil Protection authorities with additional real-time data regarding potential or ongoing emergencies in a designated geographical area. The approach chosen is to retrieve from social media the posts containing specific terms used by citizens during emergencies (i.e. an initial project terminology was developed) and to classify them according to their relative importance compared to the other posts selected, identifying those to be evaluated first by the Civil Protection staff. This is achieved by calculating the total score of each post as the sum of the scores attributed to the initial terminology keywords therein contained (i.e. three severity scales were defined to rank the terms according to their potential hazard level). This novel Civil Protection Emergency System model has been applied to a set of simulated emergency events with the aim of testing the algorithm and to verify the effectiveness of the platform in order to assess if it could provide helpful additional information to Civil Protection, improving its overall emergency coping capacity.