Twitter analysis in emergency management: recent research and trends

Abstract

A disaster is an unexpected event with negative consequences for individuals and societies. Typically it is interfering with a community’s or society’s ability to function. Disasters can be man-made events, accidental events, or a natural catastrophes. These events create emergencies that require rapid responses. Timely information about the emergencies has to be obtained so that the responses can aid in dealing with the emergencies. One source of timely information about disasters is provided by social media postings which often provide on-site information about a disaster. An ideally suited social media tool for disaster information is Twitter due to the sort message format. This format enables the rapid composition of short messages by entities close to a disaster describing the nature of the disaster. The contents of the messages can then be used to guide emergency responses. The aim of this paper is to review the research on the usage of Twitter for emergency management that has been published so far. There are three steps required when using messages for information about disasters. The first step is to collect the data contained in the messages. Then the data has to be preprocessed for unification of format, duplication etc. Finally relevant information has to be extracted. These steps are considered in this paper reviewing the use of Twitter for emergency management. Papers using Twitter published within the past 5 years have been included.