Social Haystack

People all over the world are regularly affected by disasters and emergencies. Besides official emergency services, ordinary citizens are getting increasingly involved in crisis response work. They are usually present on-site at the place of incident and use social media to share information about the event. For emergency services, the large amount of citizen-generated content in social media, however, means that finding high-quality information is similar to “finding a needle in a haystack”. This article presents an approach to how a dynamic and subjective quality assessment of citizen-generated content could support the work of emergency services. First, we present results of our empirical study concerning the usage of citizen-generated content by emergency services. Based on our literature review and empirical study, we derive design guidelines and describe a concept for dynamic quality measurement that is implemented as a service-oriented web-application “Social Haystack.” Finally, we outline findings of its evaluation and implications thereof.

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