"OMG, from here, I can see the flames!": a use case of mining location based social networks to acquire spatio-temporal data on forest fires

The emergence of innovative web applications, often labelled as Web 2.0, has permitted an unprecedented increase of content created by non-specialist users. In particular, Location-based Social Networks (LBSN) are designed as platforms allowing the creation, storage and retrieval of vast amounts of georeferenced and user-generated contents. LBSN can thus be seen by Geographic Information specialists as a timely and cost-effective source of spatio-temporal information for many fields of application, provided that they can set up workflows to retrieve, validate and organise such information. This paper aims to improve the understanding on how LBSN can be used as a reliable source of spatio-temporal information, by analysing the temporal, spatial and social dynamics of Twitter activity during a major forest fire event in the South of France in July 2009.