A Twitter Data Credibility Framework - Hurricane Harvey as a Use Case

Social media data have been used to improve geographic situation awareness in the past decade. Although they have free and openly availability advantages, only a small proportion is related to situation awareness, and reliability or trustworthiness is a challenge. A credibility framework is proposed for Twitter data in the context of disaster situation awareness. The framework is derived from crowdsourcing, which states that errors propagated in volunteered information decrease as the number of contributors increases. In the proposed framework, credibility is hierarchically assessed on two tweet levels. The framework was tested using Hurricane Harvey Twitter data, in which situation awareness related tweets were extracted using a set of predefined keywords including power, shelter, damage, casualty, and flood. For each tweet, text messages and associated URLs were integrated to enhance the information completeness. Events were identified by aggregating tweets based on their topics and spatiotemporal characteristics. Credibility for events was calculated and analyzed against the spatial, temporal, and social impacting scales. This framework has the potential to calculate the evolving credibility in real time, providing users insight on the most important and trustworthy events.