Report on

APPLICATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA DATA

TOWARDS DISASTER PREPAREDNESS
Submitted in the partial fulfillment of the requirements

for US 694 course

SEMINAR

of the degree of

Master in Urban systems

By

BHAVANA CHEKKALA

213420004

Under the supervision of

Prof. Arnab Jana

Center for Urban Science and Engineering (CUSE)

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay

May 2022

1
Declaration

I declare that this written submission represents my ideas in my own words and where
other’s ideas or words have been included, I have adequately cited and referenced the
sources. I also declare that I have adhered to all principles of academic honesty and
integrity and have not misrepresented or fabricated or falsified any ideas, data, facts or
sources in my submission. I understand that any violation of the above will because of
disciplinary action by the institute and evoke penal action from the sources which have
thus not been properly cited or from whom proper permission has not been taken when
needed.

Date: 03.05.2022

Place: Mumbai

Name: BHAVANA CHEKKALA

Roll no.: 213420004

Abstract

Nowadays, People, government agencies, and relief groups all create huge amounts of data
via the usage of social media platforms. Following natural disasters, the use of social media
platforms such as Twitter escalates and the majority of the research relies on the use of
social media data and related analysis tools during the short-term response phase of a
disaster.

As a result, harnessing the power of social media analytic tools is becoming more common.
The use of social media data for emergency preparedness is yet unknown.

This study employs a structural methodology to understand the use of social media data in
disaster management. It is a desk-based research to look into the potential and challenges
that aid agencies encounter in assessing social media data with social media analysis tools
for disaster management.

That social media analysis tools allow aid agencies to measure the efficiency of their
preparedness communication on social media, monitor risks and disasters, and
strengthening community disaster resilience networks.

The interplay of limitations and challenges pertaining to the user of the tool or the tool
itself affected overall (non) usage of social media analytic tools.

Keywords: social media; social media data; disaster management; literature review
CONTENTS
Declaration 2

Abstract 3

Introduction 6
Social media data use in disaster management 6
Reliability on the social media data 6
Aim: 7
Objectives: 7
Methodology 7

Data collection through social media: Theory 9

2.1 Data sources 9
2.1.1 Sensors 9
2.1.2 Human sensors 9
2.1.3 Social media platform 10
2.1.4 Third Parties 11
2.2 Social media user 13
2.2.1 Governmental Authority 13
2.2.2 Research academy or institution 13
2.2.3 NGO 13
2.2.4 Public 14

Application of social media data 15

3.1 Disaster management Phase 15
3.2 Disaster management Type 16
3.3 Data Information dimension 18
3.3.1 Spatial 18
Spatial Coverage 18
User-defined 18
Geotagging 18
3.3.2 Temporal 20
Pre-event 20
Real-time 20
Post-event 21

Social media data analytics methodology 23

4.1 Data management methodologies 23
4.2 Data analysis methodologies 23
4.3 Challenges and Research Issues: 26
 4.3.1 Geo-tag Determination 26
4.3.2 Report Verification 26
4.3.3 Automated Report Summarization 27
4.3.4 Spatial-Temporal Mining for Social Behavior Prediction 27
4.3.4 Scalability and Safety 27
4.4 Barriers influencing the selection and use of Social Media Analysis Tools 28
4.4.1 Language 28
4.4.2 Culture 30
4.4.3 Value 30
4.4.4 Human resources 31
4.4.5 Financial 31
4.4.6 Technology 32
4.4.7 Data 32

Case study 34
5.1 Chennai floods: Social media and crowdsourcing helping people on ground 34
5.1.1 How social media helps in such situations 35

Conclusion 37
References 38
 1. Introduction

The usage of social media for open communication across cultural circles has increased
dramatically over the last decade, including blogs, chat rooms, wikis, Facebook, Twitter,
Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube Channels, and WhatsApp. Social media data is rapidly being
employed in disaster management to convey essential information to the public about the
hazard event, relief, and recovery, to develop situational awareness of the disaster effect
and emergent incidents across time, and to acquire, verify, and spread data at the regional
level (Sutton et al. 2008; Lindsay 2011; Houston et al. 2014).

Social media data use in disaster management

Victims use social media platforms to stay in touch with the rest of the world after a
disaster. Due to a congested mobile phone network caused by the recent tsunami and
earthquake, people in Japan were unable to communicate with one another. They utilised
Twitter, Facebook, Skype, and local Japanese social networks to communicate and remain
in touch with their loved ones.

In current history, social media has progressed from a passive source of information (i.e.,
transmitting unchanging material about disaster preparedness) to an emergency
management tool capable of broadcasting real-time warning information, accepting
requests for aid, and developing situational awareness based on user activity (Lindsay
2011).

Reliability on the social media data

Despite the fact that social media can aid disaster relief efforts, it lacks the inherent
coordination capability that allows multiple relief groups to successfully coordinate and
exchange information, resources, and plans.

On the other hand, crowdsourcing solutions based on social media applications like Twitter
and Ushahidi have a huge potential for gathering data from disaster sites and displaying it
for relief decision-making.
In terms of coordination, accuracy, and security, there are considerable hurdles that must
be solved for crowdsourcing to be a useful tool for facilitating humanitarian effort.

While social media has grown in popularity as a viable conduit for expanding disaster
management's horizons, the socioeconomic imbalance in the utilisation of social media
data should make us wary of using these technologies for this purpose. Due to the "digital
divide," which refers to the gap between those who have and do not have access to
information and communication technologies (van Dijk 2006), certain groups (e.g., low
income, low education, and the elderly) may lack the tools and skills to access social media
and thus be excluded from information sharing through social media.

Aim:
This article examines how social media is being used for disaster management, both now
and in the future. It is distinguished by a flourishing, but limited, and relatively recent
literature.

Objectives:
The following are the paper's key objectives:

1. Aiming to identify problems of employing social media data for disaster management, as
well as data processing and management systems;

2. A study categorization for social media data analysis and handling is used and optimized;

3. A study of the published studies on data analysis and management using the suggested
categorization.

Methodology
The study discussed in this article focuses on figuring out how social media data may help
with disaster management. We do so by looking through the literature for strategies for
managing and evaluating social media data for disaster management.
The paper is structured based on the categorization adopted from a taxonomy of Source:
Use of Social Media Data in Disaster Management: A Survey (Jedsada Phengsuwan et al.,
2021, 13, 46).

Figure 1: Social media data management categorization. Source: (Jedsada Phengsuwan et al., 2021, 13, 46)
 2. Data collection through social media: Theory

2.1 Data sources

Sources of information

Disaster risk management necessitates the collection of high-quality, extensive data from a
variety of sources connected to the tragedy of the issue. Any sensors and data services that
deliver data to a data consumer might be considered data sources. Sensor, Social Media
User, Social Media Platform, and Third-Party are the four key data sources for social media
data analysis presented in this section, which are classed in the taxonomy as Sensor, Social
Media User, Social Media Platform, and Third Party. For each component of disaster
management, we examine the features of data sources.

2.1.1 Sensors

Data sources that generate original data for social media data analysis are included in the
Sensor subclass. Physical sensors (e.g., remote sensing, in situ sensors, wireless sensor
networks) and human sensors are examples of data sources (e.g., social media, blogs, and
crowdsourcing). A physical sensor is a collection of physical sensing devices that monitor
and measure physical occurrences before converting the data into a human-readable
format. A social or human sensor, on the other hand, is made up of human behaviours and
interactions that are used to detect real-world occurrences and create data in the social
network.

2.1.2 Human sensors

Human sensors utilise people to observe and measure real-world phenomena and
generate different types of observation data, including social media data. The emergence of
social networks and mobile applications has enabled people to report observed events.
These activities are considered human sensing and can be a significant data source for
effective urban risk analytics.

The data sources include RSS feeds, social media, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, SMS, and
online news. Similarly, crowdsourcing is a process that encourages people to give their
contributions concerning certain tasks in a specific context. This process is widely used in
disaster management applications, where people can report a disaster event that they
observed. For example, in 2010, people used Ushahidi, a web-based and mobile
crowdsourcing application, to report about the earthquakes in Haiti.

2.1.3 Social media platform

In theory, social media data may be accessed immediately on social media sites (e.g.,
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram). These sites are important data sources for disaster
management social media data analytics.

“Most social media platforms provide HTTP-based Application Programming Interfaces

(APIs) for data consumers to access their social media services (e.g., data service and
analytics services). Data consumers can use their tools to communicate with the respective
APIs to collect and store social media data for their purposes.” (Lomborg, S & Bechmann A,
30, 256–265).

“For example, Twitter provides search APIs that enable consumers to find historical or
real-time data by using keywords or hashtags. Much research on using social media data
for disaster management utilises such APIs to access social media data directly from the
social media platforms.” (Yin, J.; Lampert, A.; Cameron, M.; Robinson, B.; Power, R, 27,
52–59)

Due to the unstructured characteristics of social media data and the indeterminacy of the
sources, the quality and trustworthiness of the collected social media data become
significant issues. (Immonen, A.; Pääkkönen, P.; Ovaska, E, 3, 2028–2043).

Additional data preparation operations (e.g., data filtering, data categorization, and data
extraction) are necessary as a result of this. Some social media sites (such as Facebook and
Twitter) have implemented data access limitations due to privacy concerns.
2.1.4 Third Parties

“Social media data are also collected and organised by organisations and institutions for
specific purposes. Due to the benefits of Open Data, some of them have been interested in
opening their collected social media data for others.” (Immonen, A.; Pääkkönen, P.; Ovaska,
E, 3, 2028–2043).

These organisations are considered alternative data sources for social media data. This
section discusses the different methods of accessing social media data. Third parties who
provide their collected social media data are considered alternative data sources for
conducting research on social media data analytics for disaster management. These social
media data are collected and organised in a specific way to be used for a specific purpose.
For example,

- CrisisLexT26 provides crisis-related tweets during emergency events, which are

collected from Twitter by using crisis-specific keywords. 26
- CrowdFlower provides the Figure Eight platform for free open datasets. These
include tweets relevant to various kinds of disasters.

The majority of social media data acquired by third-party data sources is frequently
processed further to provide higher-quality information. In addition to being utilised for
disaster management, datasets from third-party data sources may be used as training
datasets and for data analysis in many disaster management studies.
Table 1: Social media for data sources for disaster management.
Source: (Jedsada Phengsuwan et al., 2021)

Paper reference Data source Access method

Physical Human Sensor

Sensor

Crowdsourced social media curation for - Twitter Direct Access via Twitter
disaster awareness. (Rogstadius, J.; APIs
Vukovic, M.; Teixeira, C.A.; Kostakos,
V.; Karapanos, E.; Laredo, J.A.,)

Using Social Media to Enhance - Twitter Direct Access via Twitter

Emergency Situation Awareness. APIs
(Yin, J.; Lampert, A.; Cameron, M.;
Robinson, B.; Power, R. ) IEEE Intell.
Syst. 2012

Using humans as sensors: An - Twitter Direct access via Twitter

estimation-theoretic perspective. (Wang, APIs
D.; Amin, M.T.; Li, S.; Abdelzaher, T.;
Kaplan, L.; Gu, S.; Pan, C.; Liu, H.;
Aggarwal, C.C.; Ganti, R.; et al.)
IPSN-14 13th International
Symposium on Information
Processing in Sensor Networks, Berlin,
Germany, 15–17 April 2014

Discussion and Analysis of the - Ushahidi crowdsourcing Mobile App, Web

Crowdsourcing Mode of Public Services
Participation in Emergency
Management. (Shen, H.) In Proceedings
of the 2015 8th International
Symposium on Computational
Intelligence and Design (ISCID),
Hangzhou, China, 12–13 December
2015

Human Sensor Networks for Improved USGS, NOAA Flickr crowdsourcing Web, Web Services
Modeling of Natural (Aulov, O.; Halem,
M.) Disasters. Proc. IEEE 2012
2.2 Social media user

Messages from various social media accounts have varying quality and trustworthiness
(Immonen, A.; Pääkkönen, P.; Ovaska, E., 3, 2028–2043). Official accounts used by
government entities, for example, are more likely to be trustworthy than personal accounts
used by the general population. Despite the fact that government organisations in charge
of disaster management utilize social media to communicate catastrophe-related
information, they still play a little role in communities. Instead, it is the general population
that contributes significantly to information networks during disasters.

To summarize, many categories of social media users play varied roles in disaster
management, each giving distinct context, quality, and reliability of social media data.

2.2.1 Governmental Authority

Organizations that help in catastrophe response and recovery. These organisations, such as
the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), are authorised to

disseminate official announcements and actionable warning information to people in

disaster-prone areas, and

provide supporting information for disaster management, such as the Geological Survey of
India (GSI), the British Geological Survey (BGS), and national meteorological offices.

2.2.2 Research academy or institution

Disaster management is being studied by institutions or research organisations.

2.2.3 NGO

Private-sector organisations that use social media to provide disaster-related information.

When compared to information supplied by individual users, this user type contributes a
higher percentage of information than government authorities and delivers a higher quality
of information. Save the Hills, Cable News Network (CNN), and Asian News International are
examples of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) (ANI).
2.2.4 Public

Individuals who have their own social media profiles. By sharing disaster-related
information, this user type contributes the most to social media. When compared to other
sorts of users, this group has the largest number of users and hence makes up the largest
percentage of information networks.

The majority of the research examined here depends on information provided by public
users, despite the fact that the material may be of dubious quality and reliability. As a
result, improving data quality and increasing the accuracy of social media data analysis
using social media data preparation procedures (e.g., data filtering, data categorization,
and data extraction) proves difficult.
 3. Application of social media data

“To investigate the contribution of social media applications in the context of disaster
management strategy, which is a discipline for dealing with disasters or avoiding disasters
where possible. In general, disaster management strategies consist of four phases:
mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.” (Albtoush, R.; Dobrescu, R.; Ionescou, F.,
2011, 53-62).

These four phases demand supporting tools and technologies for effective disaster
management. Several recent research works have utilised social media data to address
problems in different types of disasters and phases of disaster management. According to
The Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT. EM-DAT the International Disaster Database), there
are two general groups of disasters: natural disasters and technological disasters, with
several types of disasters within each of these groups.

The disaster management phase is the step in the disaster management life cycle that
social media applications contribute to, whereas the disaster management type denotes
the kind of disaster apps. We analyse the present coverage of existing social media disaster
management applications and the overall image of existing applications based on these
aspects.

3.1 Disaster management Phase

The phases of disaster management define a catastrophe's regular life cycle and provide a
valuable framework for response. (Albtoush, R.; Dobrescu, R.; Ionescou, F., 2011).

At various stages of disaster management, there has been a spike in the use of social
media. Several ways to leveraging social media for disaster management have been
suggested in the literature.

This data can be used to assist with disaster recovery at various stages.

The practise of minimising the source and impact of hazards in order to keep them from
becoming disasters is known as mitigation.
Communities adopt action plans and educational initiatives to prepare for inevitable
calamities, which is referred to as preparedness.

Response refers to the actions made to protect people's lives and property during hazards
or catastrophes.

The efforts made to rebuild destroyed property and community infrastructures, as well as
to treat sick people, are referred to as recovery.

3.2 Disaster management Type

Disaster management types refer to groups of disasters, which are classified based on the
root cause of the disaster. According to the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT.
EM-DAT the International Disaster Database), there are two main groups of disasters: natural
disasters and technological disasters.

Natural disasters are occurrences that occur as a result of natural processes or phenomena
that can result in the loss of life and property. Biological, geophysical, climatological,
hydrological, meteorological, and extraterrestrial disasters are the six sub-groups of natural
disasters. Floods, landslides, earthquakes, and tsunamis are examples of natural hazards.
Disasters caused by technology processes or human actions are known as technical
disasters. Industrial and transportation accidents are two instances of technology disasters.
 Table 2: Social media data application for disaster management. Source: (Jedsada
Phengsuwan et al., 2021)

Paper reference Application

Disaster Management Phase Disaster Management Type

Human Sensor Networks for Preparedness, Response Technological, Natural

Improved Modeling of
Natural (Aulov, O.; Halem,
M.) Disasters. Proc. IEEE
2012

Public behaviour response Preparedness, Response, Recovery Natural disaster

analysis in disaster events
utilizing visual analytics of
microblog data.
(Chae, J.; Thom, D.; Jang, Y.;
Kim, S.; Ertl, T.; Ebert, D.S)
2014

Rapid assessment of disaster Preparedness, Response, Recovery Natural disaster

damage using social media
activity.
(Kryvasheyeu, Y.; Chen, H.;
Obradovich, N.; Moro, E.;
Van Hentenryck, P.; Fowler,
J.; Cebrian, M) Sci. Adv. 2016

Using social media for Response Natural disaster

emergency response and
urban sustainability: A case
study of the 2012 Beijing
rainstorm. (Wang, Y.; Wang,
T.; Ye, X.; Zhu, J.; Lee, J.)
Sustainability 2015

Geographic situational Preparedness, Response Natural disaster

awareness: Mining tweets for
disaster preparedness,
emergency response, impact,
and recovery. (Huang, Q.;
Xiao, Y) ISPRS Int. J. Geo. Inf.
2015
3.3 Data Information dimension

There are a variety of approaches for extracting geographical and temporal information
from social media material.

3.3.1 Spatial
Although spatial representations of social media data, such as geo-location, play an
essential part in social-media-based event detection or event analysis, few social media
data provide information about users’ locations (Cheng, Z.; Caverlee, J.; Lee, K., 2010,
759–768).

Furthermore, social media contains a wide range of location information, ranging from a
highly accurate location using geographic coordinates (e.g., longitude and latitude) to a very
fuzzy location using descriptive language (e.g., city name).

Spatial Coverage

Many entries just indicate the geographical extent of a town/village/locality, a district, a

country/province, the continent, or other comparable information.

User-defined

In the post, the user indicates the location, either by name or by geographic coordinates.

Geotagging

When users submit a message on social media platforms, the algorithms automatically or
manually append geolocation information.
 Table 3: Data information dimension: Spatial for disaster management. Source: (Jedsada
Phengsuwan et al., 2021)

References Spatial Pros and Cons

Geo-Tagging User-Defined Spatial Coverage

You are where you - Twitter users’ Twitter users’ The proposed approach
tweet: A city-level location city-level location can improve the accuracy
content-based estimation of identifying the
approach to locations of hazard
geo-locating twitter events.
users. (Cheng, Z & The temporal aspect of
Caverlee, J.; Lee, K., the identified location
2010) needs to be further
investigated for more
accurate
decision-making.

Towards social user - profiling users’ profiling users’ The approach can be
profiling: Unified and home locations home locations applied to disseminate
discriminative disaster early warning
influence model for messages to social media
inferring home users whose home
locations. (Li, R & locations are at risk.
Wang, S.; Deng, H.;
Wang, R.; Chang,
K.C.C, 2012)

# Earthquake: spatial pattern spatial pattern - The analysis of patterns

Twitter as a analysis analysis between the distance
distributed sensor from the epicenter and
system. (Crooks, A & time using social media
Croitoru, A.; can enhance situational
Stefanidis, A.; awareness.
Radzikowski, J., However, the proposed
2013) method requires a
sufficient number of
tweets to avoid data
quality issues.

Using social media - Hot-spot detection Hot-spot detection The proposed method for
for emergency spatial analysis enables
response and urban timely decision-making
sustainability: A case for emergency response
study of the 2012 and full awareness of
Beijing rainstorm. public concern.
(Wang, Y & Wang, T.;
Ye, X.; Zhu, J.; Lee, J.,
2015)
3.3.2 Temporal
The majority of social networking programmes include a timestamp with the material they
post. The timestamp of the event and the content can be used to determine the temporal
relationship between occurrences. We looked at how existing algorithms for event
detection employ temporal information. We divided temporal information into three
categories in the context of event detection.

Pre-event

This reflects the time period leading up to the event of interest. In general, a social media
statement released before to the occurrence of an event can be analysed to determine the
following:

● Alerts, such as a Met Office bulletin about terrible weather before heavy rain, a
cyclone notice, and so on, serve as a warning sign for an imminent natural
catastrophe.
● Identification of precursor events, such as a social media post regarding a leaning
electric pole in a particular region, which can serve as a prelude to landslide event
detection, and
● Temporal offset- pre-event social media postings are analysed to identify the offset
between the time of the post and the actual event, such as the time taken after the
leaning pole post and the actual landslide at that location. Pre-event social media
posts can therefore be used to support disaster management's mitigation and
readiness stages.

Real-time

This is the time frame in which the event is taking place. When an event occurs in real time,
social media may be used to share information about the occurrences that occur during
the event. In general, real-time posts from social media during the event may be analysed
for the following:

● obtaining situational awareness- for example, "trains cancelled, schools closed in

Kerala due to heavy rains," or a social media post about "setback due to natural
disaster on NH-8,"
 ● Extracting warnings about the disaster's after-effects/impacts- for example, "high
tides are anticipated in coastal areas after the aftershocks," and
● Response, relief, and recovery—for example, a tweet during the Kerala flood in
2018: "shortage of bubble wrap and ready-to-eat items in Sanskrit College Palayam”.

Post-event

This is the time after the event of interest has occurred. Following disasters, social media is
frequently used to communicate about needed supplies, missing persons information,
death tolls, property losses, government and non-governmental organisation relief
operations, protective measures to be taken while returning home, and funds donated by
various authorities, among other things. As a result, post-event data may be analysed for
the following purposes:

Identifying the relief and recovery measures that are necessary, as well as determining the
temporal offset between the time of the post and the time of the actual occurrence.

It is critical to examine public/community behaviour before, during, and after catastrophes

in order to implement effective disaster response, management, planning, and mitigation.
We may utilise the time-stamped, geo-tagged data from social media for this purpose
because it is the easiest and most prevalent approach to sample public opinion.
 Table 4: Data information dimension: Temporal for disaster management. Source: (Jedsada
Phengsuwan et al., 2021)

Paper reference Temporal Pros and Cons

Pre-event Real-Time Post-event

Public behavior Analysis of the Analysis of the Analysis of the The spatiotemporal
response analysis in temporal distribution temporal distribution temporal distribution visualisation can bring a
disaster events utilizing of tweets for of tweets for of tweets for significant benefit for
visual analytics of Hurricane Sandy Hurricane Sandy Hurricane Sandy decisionmaking. However,
microblog data. (Chae, obtaining spatial information
J. & Thom, D.; Jang, Y.; from micro-blogs is a big
Kim, S.; Ertl, T.; Ebert, challenge that is not
D.S., 2014) discussed in these papers.

Spatial, temporal, and - Spatial and temporal - The idea of using social
content analysis of analysis of wildfire media for wildfire hazards
Twitter for wildfire Twitter activities analysis is very interesting,
hazards. (Wang, Z & using kernel density but the analysis method and
Ye, X.; Tsou, M.H., estimation (KDE) evaluation are too simple.
2016)

Using social media for - Trend analysis of the - This is the first study to utilise
emergency response 2012 Beijing Chinese social media to
and urban rainstorm using uncover emergency events in
sustainability: A case time-series an urban city. This paper
study of the 2012 decomposition of introduced a useful
Beijing rainstorm. social media data data-cleaning method for
(Wang, Y & Wang, T.; Chinese texts, which can be
Ye, X.; Zhu, J.; Lee, J., used for many purposes.
2015) However, the analysis the
use of the extracted spatial
information is too simple.

Geographic situational - Temporal trend - This paper makes a very

awareness: Mining analysis using logistic detailed and complete
tweets for disaster regression for tweets categorisation for social
preparedness, related to Hurricane media in disaster
emergency response, Sandy management. This expert
impact, and recovery. knowledge can be reused by
(Huang, Q & Xiao, Y., other researchers. However,
2015) the data analysis is too
simple.

Using Social Media to - Extraction of - This paper provides a

Enhance Emergency situation awareness solution to processing social
Situation Awareness. information using media data in real time.
(Yin, J & Lampert, A.; the burst detection However, the evaluation is
Cameron, M.; technique and online not sufficient to prove that
Robinson, B.; Power, clustering the proposed method is
R., 2012) practical and applicable to
real-world applications.
 4. Social media data analytics methodology

4.1 Data management methodologies

Acquiring, classifying, archiving, and analyzing social media data for accessibility,
dependability, and timeliness are all part of data management for social media. Every day,
social media creates a significant amount of data.

Facebook, for example, creates roughly four petabytes of data every day, according to
(kinsta. Wild and Interesting Facebook Statistics and Facts. 2020). The sheer volume of data
presents a huge hurdle in managing social media data, making it a Big Data issue. As a
result, social media data management and analysis systems must be able to handle the
"four Vs" of Big Data analytics: volume, variety, velocity, and veracity. The state of the art in
different systems and research utilising social media analytics for disaster management is
presented in this section. We looked at how data is gathered, filtered, pre-processed,
localised, stored, indexed, and queried from a data management standpoint.

4.2 Data analysis methodologies

The researchers demonstrated an earthquake event and early warning utilising a social
method in (Sakaki, T.; Okazaki, M.; Matsuo, Y., 2013, 919–931). This was done by combining
semantic analysis with Twitter real-time data. They established two main assumptions: that
each Twitter user is a sensor, and that each tweet has a time and place linked with it.
Positive and negative tweets were classified using semantic analysis. Future Internet 2021,
18 of 24 earthquake-related tweets were assessed as good, while tweets unconnected to
seismic occurrences were classed as bad. They also utilised a machine learning approach
called support vector machine (SVM) to classify tweets.

On the other hand, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modelling technique in the
information retrieval domain, was used in (Cheng, Z & Caverlee, J.; Lee, K., 2010). LDA was
used to extract the inherent topic structure from a set of social media messages, and the
extracted topic referred to an event (e.g., 2011 Virginia earthquake).
The authors gave an example of topics and the proportions of each topic to all messages
and showed how the earthquake events captured from the topics constituted a small
proportion of messages. Using the LDA topic model approach, meaningful topics with many
iterations were discovered. Abnormal events captured from extracted topics did not
happen frequently and covered only a small fraction of the social media data stream. In
order to identify such abnormal events, the authors used seasonal trend decomposition
based on locally weighted regression (Loess), which they called STL. In STL, the reminder
component is used to implement control charts. The detected anomaly events are
compared with other social media data to confirm the anomalies.

A candidate retrieval algorithm was used in (Reuter, T.; Cimiano, P, 2012, 22) for retrieving
events from the database. The authors implemented feature extraction to extract spatial,
temporal, and textual information, and then used scoring and ranking to determine which
document belonged to which event. SVM-based classification was the methodology used in
this paper for event detection.
 Table 5: Methodologies used in data analysis and management for disaster management.
Source: (Jedsada Phengsuwan et al., 2021)
Paper References
Event-based
classification of social
media streams. 2nd
ACM International
Conference on
Multimedia Retrieval,
Hong Kong, China, 22
(Reuter, T.; Cimiano, P,
2012)
Tweet analysis for
real-time event
detection and
earthquake reporting
system development.
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data
Eng. 2013, (Sakaki, T.;
Okazaki, M.; Matsuo, Y.,
2013
Public behavior
response analysis in
disaster events utilizing
visual analytics of
microblog data.
(Comput. Graph.),
(Chae, J. & Thom, D.;
Jang, Y.; Kim, S.; Ertl, T.;
Ebert, D.S., 2014)
Methodology
Data management
Consists of a pipeline of
tools to geotag, classify text,
and tag “Needs” from
tweets. Elastic search is
used to store and query
data. Data sources consist
of Twitter, OpenStreetMap,
and satellite images.
Semantic analyses were
used to extract tweets
related to earthquakes from
Twitter and to detect events
in real time.
A topic modelling technique,
“Latent Dirichlet Allocation”,
was used to retrieve
information from a set of
social media messages.
Data analysis
CrisisNLP and CrisisLexT26
were used to train the
classifier. A location-specific
D-Record ontology was used,
which consists of the
concepts of “Needs” and
“Availability”. Support vector
machine (SVM)-based text
classifier.
Used a support vector
machine (SVM) for the tweet
classification and a
probabilistic model for
location estimation.
Seasonal trend
decomposition based on
locally weighted regression
(Loess), known as
Seasonal-Trend
Decomposition procedure
based on Loess smoothing
(STL), was used to identify
abnormal events.
Pros and cons
Geo-locating tweets using
OpenStreetMap and
location mentions.
Matching locations with
“Needs” to locations with
supplies. The system is
limited to Twitter data.
Relatively smaller set of
data.
An example of real-time
earthquake event detection
using semantic analysis and
a real-time Twitter feed
where a user functions as a
sensor. The precision and
recall of the system based
on numbers of tweets were
evaluated to choose the
best performance. The
model assumes a single
instance of a target event.
The abnormal event
detection was based on
probabilistic topic
extraction and time-series
decomposition. Interactive
visual analytic system.
Analytics and processing
approach were not of a
real-time nature.
4.3 Challenges and Research Issues:
As a crowdsourcing method, social media gives aggregate situational knowledge, new and
crucial communication channels, and some options for individual aid. To make
crowdsourcing a viable tool, however, we must overcome numerous difficulties, including
sensemaking, security, and coordination, in order to fully exploit both data and
communications capabilities. We may use text mining and social computing technologies to
address these issues by controlling social knowledge and modelling social behaviour during
disaster aid.

4.3.1 Geo-tag Determination

Crowdsourced data may contain erroneous geo-tags or may not have any at all. As a result,
using social mining to both a reporter's social and physical networks might aid in locating a
report's genuine geographical elements. Furthermore, research has revealed the
importance of utilising the information provided by the responder group. For example,
groupsourcing10 collects disaster information such as a relief situation summary, validated
geotag information, and transportation conditions from a sanctioned group of individuals
with disparate resources, goals, and capabilities working at the disaster scene to
supplement crowdsourcing information.

4.3.2 Report Verification

Crowdsourcing can filter reports in some cases automatically using photographs, videos,
and comments from other reports. Users may validate a report on Ushahidi by clicking a
verification button. To obtain collective input, it leaves the verification problem to the
masses. However, this strategy—technically known as an open self-adjusting
method—requires a huge number of individuals to validate the reports. Across the breadth
of Ushahidi map situations, however, just a few persons act as verifiers for Ushahidi maps.
Unless there are greater incentives for verification, a fake message might spread swiftly
with effective camouflage, especially in a chaotic crisis situation.

As crisis maps and other crowdsourcing applications are created, trust management
systems will be required to detect and report suspicious postings, flagging them for further
investigation and verification.
4.3.3 Automated Report Summarization

Summary request reports and the ability to drill down to individual tweets and messages
will be required by police agencies and other first responders.

Because the volume and velocity of messages in a major catastrophe would be so high,
automated summaries and analysis to make sense of hundreds, if not thousands, of
unstructured messages will be crucial.

4.3.4 Spatial-Temporal Mining for Social Behavior Prediction

Volunteers and victims on the ground—that is, people with a phone or other
communication device—are now reporting occurrences and demands. There are no apps
for projecting future demands or filling in the expected requests that would occur from
those living in blacked-out locations who have restricted communication abilities.

Scientific data on earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters might be used to
supplement user data in models that forecast the timing and location of future requests
and requirements. First responders, government agencies, and non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) might use crowdsourced data and model findings to stay ahead of
the demand curve and be more proactive in deploying assistance and rescue capabilities.
One option is to create spatiotemporal classifiers for models to help with demand
forecasting.

4.3.4 Scalability and Safety

The rising number of requests, agencies, and agent behaviours dramatically expands the
dimension of the search area, making scalability an issue for many intelligent distributed
systems. To keep a system stable, large-scale data-management technologies will be
required.

Another issue to consider in a disaster relief management strategy, particularly when

designing a crowdsourcing system, is safety. Such solutions must respect NGOs' privacy
and secure the safety of their personnel while making data publicly available.
4.4 Barriers influencing the selection and use of Social Media Analysis
Tools

4.4.1 Language

Language refers to the language used for making a post on social media. The languages of
the social media data are investigated and classified into four categories: global language,
the local language, mixed language, and mixed script.

The term "global language" refers to English-language social media posts.

Social media posts in languages other than English are referred to as "local language."

Mixed Language refers to posts on social media that combine two or more languages.

Mixed Script refers to social media postings that combine two or more languages in a
stylistic or linguistic variant. For example, a Twitter user may utilise English script to tweet in
Hindi.
Table 6: Languages used on social media for disaster management. Source: (Jedsada
Phengsuwan et al., 2021)

Paper Reference Language

Global Local Mixed language Mixed script

Using Social Media to Yes - - -

Enhance Emergency
Situation Awareness. (Yin,
J & Lampert, A.;
Cameron, M.; Robinson,
B.; Power, R., 2012)

CrisisTracker: Yes Arabic English, Arabic -

Crowdsourced social
media curation for
disaster awareness.
(Rogstadius, J & Vukovic,
M.; Teixeira, C.A.;
Kostakos, V.; Karapanos,
E.; Laredo, J.A., 2013)

Practical extraction of Yes - - -

disaster-relevant
information from social
media. (Imran, M. &
Elbassuoni, S.; Castillo,
C.; Diaz, F.; Meier, P.,
2013)

Communicating on Yes Filipino English, Filipino -

Twitter during a disaster:
An analysis of tweets
during Typhoon Haiyan in
the Philippines.
(Takahashi, B & Tandoc,
E.C.; Carmichael, C.,
2015)

Extracting and Yes Hindi English, Hindi Hindi

Summarizing Situational
Information from the
Twitter Social Media
during Disasters. (Rudra,
K. & Ganguly, N.; Goyal,
P.; Ghosh, S., 2018,)

Social-media analysis for Yes Spanish, German - -

disaster prevention:
Forest fire in Artenara
and Valleseco, Canary
Islands.
(Zamarreño-Aramendia
& G.; Cristòfol, F.J.;
De-San-eugenio vela, J.;
Ginesta, X., 2020)
Understanding text-based information created by social media has gotten more difficult as
a result of this variation. Natural language processing (NLP) has played a critical role in
interpreting and extracting relevant information from text data and aiding disaster
management in this case. The interplay and possible conflict between the language(s)
understood by the tool's user and the language of the social media analysis tools interface
acts as a barrier to selecting and using specific tools.

Furthermore, if users are constrained to just analysing social media data in English or a
limited number of languages, discrepancies in the language of social media data and the
data that certain tools may analyse may limit the utility of Socisl media analysis tools for
readiness.

The rate at which social media data becomes available in other languages may differ from
the time it takes for tools to analyse the data in those languages to become available.

Some demographic groups (e.g., the young) may employ slang or a sub-language, which
may make it difficult to analyse the data. Abbreviations like HTH (here/happy to assist), for
example, may not be understood by all users. Due to language barriers between the social
media data to be analysed and the languages spoken and understood by the user, data
from some segments of the public may be omitted from the study.

4.4.2 Culture

An organization's or country's culture may either help or prevent the adoption of new
technology like social media analysis tools.

Aside from organizational culture, cultural differences in connectivity, access to, and usage
of smartphones may mean that there is a limited quantity of social media data accessible
for analysis in some countries, limiting the utility of employing social media analysis tools.

4.4.3 Value

An organizational culture that does not encourage the use of social media may be
connected to the company and its workers failing to see the benefit of analyzing social
media data, reflecting the relationship between obstacles.
4.4.4 Human resources

These barriers also apply to the use of social media analysis tools, according to this study,
and include a lack of human resources and time, excessive employee turnover, and an
ineffective organizational structure. High staff turnover can result in a lack of resources for
utilizing social media as well as an organizational culture that does not encourage its usage,
since time spent teaching personnel in how to use social media may be regarded useless
after they leave the company.

As a result, the human resource requirements will vary depending on the sophistication of
the social media analytic techniques utilized by humanitarian groups. Human
resource-related constraints may also apply to social media analysis tools with restrictive or
prohibitive contracts that restrict usage. Some technologies, for example, may only allow
access to a restricted quantity of data.

4.4.5 Financial

Financial restrictions exist for both the organization and the technology. For example, while
a humanitarian organization may have adequate funds to choose from a variety of tools,
this budget may not be sufficient to cover the more extensive and expensive social media
analysis tools (e.g., Brandwatch, Radian6).

As a result, the combination of available budget and cost of social media analysis tools
might limit the alternatives accessible to humanitarian actors when choosing social media
analysis tools.

Organizations may need to invest not just in social media analysis technologies, but also in
employees or training in order to use more advanced techniques. Many nations have
modest communication resources, constraining RCRC actors in these countries to using
free or low-cost solutions with limited functionality (e.g., a small number of searches
performed).

Due to the limited quantity of social media data accessible in a single nation, free social
media analysis tools were most matched to the societies' needs.
4.4.6 Technology

The study highlighted technology-related hurdles, which mostly pertain to how certain
aspects prohibit a tool from being adopted and used by an aid group. Social media analysis
tools that can manage a large quantity of data will be necessary in nations where social
media is widely used. This is especially true if the tools are to be utilized in disaster
response, when social media analysis tools must examine millions of social media posts in
real time.

To acquire and apply the more complete social media analytic tools that provide a wide
variety of tasks, an organization will need substantial financial resources and knowledge,
demonstrating how barriers do not work in a vacuum but interact with one another.

4.4.7 Data

The majority of data-related barriers are related to social media analysis tools rather than
the tool's user. Access to saved data was seen as critical for humanitarian actors situated in
countries with significant levels of social media usage, and systems that enabled
appropriate data retention and data ownership were chosen.

In addition, when users are unable to get the essential data (for example, if the tool only
allows access to a tiny fraction of social media data (e.g., 1%), data accessibility might
operate as a barrier to the use of social media analysis tools. Because social media analysis
tools may rely on data from a source, there is a risk that the data may be of poor quality
and will not accurately represent the situation.

Members of the community are now communicating about threats and imminent
catastrophes through private social messaging applications (e.g., WhatsApp, Snapchat).
However, social media analysis tools are now unable to access this data, implying that a
large number of talks are going unnoticed. The study of this data would have privacy
consequences, so even if tools were built to evaluate it, it may not be lawful to do so.

Seven major kinds of hurdles can prohibit and impact humanitarian actors' selection and
use of social media analysis tools, as stated here. The interplay between numerous sorts of
barriers preventing and affecting the adoption of social media analysis tools creates a
 complicated link between each category. Each barrier's importance is highly dependent on
context, and not all barriers are relevant to all countries. Understanding the importance of
each obstacle in a certain situation is crucial to determining how to overcome them as part
of a long-term, sustainable approach to using social media analysis tools.

Table 7: Barriers to the selection and use of Social media analysis tools.

Overarching barrier Examples of user-related barriers Examples of tool-related barriers

Language • Language spoken by the user • Language of the data

• Limited understanding of social media and • Language of the Social media
social

Culture • Organisational culture • In some countries, the general public do not

• Absence of guidelines and frameworks for have access to smart phones (i.e., limited use of
using social media data social media)
• Lack of permission and access to use the tool

Value • In some countries, the general public do not

have access to smart phones (i.e., limited use
of social media) Value • Value of analysing
social media data is not acknowledged

Financial • Limited/no financial resources • Cost of the Social media analysis tools

Human resources • Limited human resources and time • Inflexible or prohibitive contract
• High staff turnover
• Unsuitable organisational structure

Technology (including • Limited skills and knowledge • Lack of capacity to handle large amounts of
technical competence • Limited Internet access and bandwidth information/data
and capacity) • Access to social media applications is blocked • Inability to function with low Internet speed
• Lack of usability/ease of deployment
• Not available as a mobile phone application
• Too many functions
• Lack of interoperability with other (non-social
media) sources
• No multimodality /multi-platform analysis
• Lack of protected access and user roles
• Limited compatibility between related tools
• Display capabilities
• Tool does not offer the variety of functions
needed
• Lack of contextual awareness (e.g., in keyword
analysis/natural language processing)
• The tool is out-dated
• Lack of licenses/limited user accounts
• Quickly changing standards/rules

Data • Lack of understanding of how to • Insufficient data-retention/lack of data

operationalise Social media analysis tools ownership
data • Data quality
• Data accessibility
• Obstacles to capturing data from private
networks
 5. Case study

5.1 Chennai floods: Social media and crowdsourcing helping people on

ground

Floods in Chennai have spelled disaster for the city's residents, and in times like these,
people from all over the world are pitching in to help.

People from all around the nation and even outside are pitching in to help in any way they
can, whether it's starting internet campaigns to save the people of Chennai or making a
telephone recharge for a complete stranger.

In such efforts, social media platforms have played a significant role. Professor Amit Sheth's
team, for example, is one such example. Natural disasters are nothing new to Professor
Sheth's team. They worked heavily during the floods in Jammu and Kashmir in September
2014, where they used social media to tremendously aid relief efforts.

Figure 2: Source: Chennai floods: How social media and crowdsourcing helps people on ground.
Oneindia.(Fernandes, 2015)
5.1.1 How social media helps in such situations

Images of flood water give crucial information that might aid in comprehending the
situation on the ground and planning for rescue in the event of the Chennai floods.

The lack of geolocation in most of the images (or associated tweets) is a significant
difficulty. As a result, the team turned to crowdsourcing to find a suitable location in terms
of a nearby neighborhood or a crossroads (such as the location terms Krishnaswamy
provided in her query).

Figure 2: Source: Chennai floods: How social media and crowdsourcing helps people on ground.
Oneindia.(Fernandes, 2015)
Kushal Shah, a Noida volunteer, searched through the available information online as well
as contacted others who had uploaded the images and was able to tag over 60% of them.
While the Kno.e.sis team is still working on adding more capabilities to automatically
identify places using text analysis and/or direct interactions with image posters, the figure
presents a current snapshot (see Figure 3). Anyone may use this to locate recent
photographs from their favorite subjects. People who are worried about their friends and
family may be interested in getting the most up-to-date information from social media
about the situation in which they live.

This can also aid rescue crews, who can look at the water level and other crowdsourced
information, such as requests from the impacted region, while preparing a rescue mission.
 6. Conclusion

In this study, we looked at research papers to see what role social media data plays in
disaster management, as well as data management and analytic strategies. Based on our
suggested taxonomy, which comprises data sources, languages, geographical and temporal
information, techniques, and applications, we investigated the many features of the
contributions.

Human-centric initiatives (such as social media, blogs, and crowdsourcing) have emerged as
important data sources for observing real-world occurrences and aiding catastrophe
management. Several articles have suggested using social media data for disaster
management, with Twitter being one of the most popular social media data sources. The
temporal and geographical data retrieved from Twitter is crucial for disaster management
decision-making.

Geo-location identification and analysis are major research concerns in catastrophe

management from a spatial perspective. Despite the fact that a number of techniques have
been offered in the literature, these issues remain unsolved. However, social media
content, as well as temporal data such as posting and event times, may be utilized to aid
disaster management in a variety of ways. Many studies have utilized this type of data to
detect precursor occurrences or to aid decision-making during disasters. In addition, the
literature has recommended numerous ways for managing, analyzing, and assessing social
media data. Due to the large number of created social media data, Big Data technology is
clearly a significant technology for social media data management.

Furthermore, machine learning and information retrieval methods are routinely utilized to
gather, categorize, and extract important data from social media. Temporal and
geographical data, as well as catastrophic occurrences, are examples of this type of data.
F-Measure, precision, and recall are popular assessment approaches for proposed data
collection, categorization, and extraction procedures. Finally, evidence from this survey's
application viewpoint has demonstrated that social media plays a key role in every step of
disaster management, and the data collected has been extensively employed in such
management.
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