During recent disasters and major events, we’ve seen more and more that communities and agencies are adopting social media as an important channel for sharing information. This has perhaps never been more powerfully demonstrated than in the case of the Haiti earthquake.
Monitoring Social Media streams
One of the social media tools being used heavily in the Haiti disaster relief effort is Twitter. Just by monitoring keywords such as “haiti” and “earthquake” at search.twitter.com, we can see how it’s being used: requests for personal assistance, connectivity and outage notifications for telecommunication and utility services, relief effort status updates, missing person broadcasts, sharing pictures, and of course support agencies (and others) broadcasting donation information.
Many Twitter messages also include links to other social media sites such as Flickr and YouTube, so different types of media, news and information can be shared across all of these networks and around the world very quickly.
The value of Geolocation
By adding geolocation to social media, or by consuming services that provide geolocation information, we can use GIS to build a visual model of what’s happening in real-time (or at least close to real-time). For example, geotagged or geocoded Twitter messages can be added to the map to determine exactly what is happening and where. Flickr and YouTube provide GeoRSS feeds that allow you to add the latest images and videos to the map for a specific location. Other geo-services such as the USGS feed of recent earthquake activity can also be added to the map to help identify the areas that have been impacted the most.
When we put all of these services together, we can start to build a powerful model of what’s happening in real-time.
[ Click here for a full-size image ]
This video illustrates how you can use ArcGIS Explorer, the Twitter Add-in, social media and other services to build this type of model.
Links and more Information
Although this example is for Haiti, because social media and geo-services are constantly being updated, it’s possible to build a model like this for almost any disaster situation.
Here’s a list of what was used in this scenario:
Downloads
Data sources and feeds
- USGS Earthquake GeoRSS feed.
- UN Haiti Basemap.
- YouTube Haiti Earthquake GeoRSS feed (view the API documentation).
- Flickr Haiti Earthquake GeoRSS feed.
- GeoEye imagery of Port Au Prince.
Please share any similar work with us in the comments, Resource Centers or ArcGIS Online, or leave a comment linking to examples you’ve shared elsewhere.
Visit ESRI’s disaster response and assistance site to request help and locate other resources or to contact the ESRI Disaster Coordination team.
- Nick & AL
