WallTweet: A Knowledge Ecosystem for Supporting Situation Awareness

We present WallTweet, a tweet visualization designed for wall displays and aimed at improving the situation awareness of users monitoring a crisis event utilizing tweets. Tweets are an important source of information during large-scale events, like tornados or terrorist attacks. Citizens in affected areas are often direct witnesses of the situation, and can be aware of certain details useful to, e.g., news channels and emergency response organizations. Yet, tweets are hard to visualize and put in a geographical context: large quantities of tweets get sent in a short period, that vary greatly in content and relevance with respect to the crisis at hand. Our visualization tool is currently a work in progress: it addresses these challenges by performing a semantic analysis of the tweets' content and displaying them on a ultra-high-resolution wall display. The goal of our tool is to create an inclusive experience that enhances users' situation awareness during a crisis event, by displaying geo-referenced tweets in detail, embedded into the more global geographic context of the event.

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