Situational Awareness Enhanced through Social Media Analytics: A Survey of First Responders

TL;DR

This paper surveys how social media analytics can enhance situational awareness for first responders, highlighting opportunities, barriers, and the impact of visual analytics systems based on interviews and system assessment.

Contribution

It provides insights into first responders' perspectives on social media data use and evaluates the effectiveness of the SMART visual analytics system.

Findings

First responders see value in social media for situational awareness.

Barriers include data overload and system integration challenges.

SMART improves decision-making and operational efficiency.

Abstract

Social media data has been increasingly used to facilitate situational awareness during events and emergencies such as natural disasters. While researchers have investigated several methods to summarize, visualize or mine the data for analysis, first responders have not been able to fully leverage research advancements largely due to the gap between academic research and deployed, functional systems. In this paper, we explore the opportunities and barriers for the effective use of social media data from first responders' perspective. We present the summary of several detailed interviews with first responders on their use of social media for situational awareness. We further assess the impact of SMART-a social media visual analytics system-on first responder operations.