SemSor: Combining Social and Semantic Web to Support the Analysis of Emergency Situations

In this paper we introduce SemSor, a system developed especially for the analysis of emergency situations. It constantly collects information from sources of the Social Web, maps it to unique resources in the Semantic Web and uses the annotated information as basis for the situation analysis. If an emergency situation needs to get analyzed, four steps are required: First, all information that is already known about this situation must be entered in the SemSor-GUI. Second, the entered information needs to be mapped to resources in the Semantic Web. Third, using these resources as starting nodes, a spreading activation is applied along the relationships within the Semantic Web to nd relevant Social Web information. And fourth, the newly identied information is visualized according to dierent dimensions and can be ltered and explored by the user. In an iterative process, new insights can be used to rene the query and thus improve the activated information until a comprehensive analysis of even complex situations is possible.