Social Media for Disaster Awareness and Management

Abstract

Social media has redefined crisis management in the recent years. Extraction of situation awareness information from social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. is a non-trivial task once the required framework is established. Unfortunately, most public safety authorities are still suspicious of using social media in engaging and disseminating information. This chapter reports on how social media can be effectively used in the field of emergency management along with the opportunities and challenges put forth. The chapter starts with a discussion on the functions of social media and its trustworthiness. It provides a description of the framework for disaster management system and the methodology to be adopted. The methodology consists of volunteer classification, methods of data collection, challenges faced, event detection, and data characterization with currently available disaster management tools. The chapter concludes with the division between practice and research and moves toward envisioning how social media may be used as a resource in emergency management.