Using Social Media Data to Enhance Disaster Response and Community Service

Social media usually contains real-time and vital disaster information hidden in the abundance of user-generated text messages, news, pictures or videos. Social media data has been used for disaster response, especially for major disasters such as Earth quake, Hurricane, Flood, etc. How to collect, filter, extract and manage the data and information of social media to help disaster mitigation becomes more and more critical. Many disaster response systems have been used in disaster mitigation, but most of them focused on broadcasting alert messages rather than collecting crowd-sourcing disaster information. In addition, these mechanisms didn't consider how to utilize the social network for disaster response. In this paper, we proposed the strategy for disaster information collecting, managing, extracting and classifying from social media for disaster response and community service. And we developed a social media based disaster information system and application for nature disasters. And typhoon was selected as case study to evaluate the system.