Using Social Media in Crisis Management SOTERIA Fusion Center for Managing Information Gaps

The development of mobile devices as well as social media platforms recently lead to the necessity of monitoring the latter during crisis and emergency situations. Paradoxically, the huge amount of information available through these new sources may lead to information gaps, within the Public Safety Organization operators' awareness. We describe some specific types of information gaps due first to imprecise or unreliable information and second to information overload. We then propose a set of tools aiming at reducing these information gaps and supporting the human operators in the social media generated information during crisis and emergency management. The first tool aims at geolocalising tweets relying on the content of the messages. The second tool provides sentiment analysis and clustering of multi-lingual messages and the third tool provides means for semantic information fusion and hypothesis evaluation relying on the contents and metadata of the tweets reporting about an event.