Social media can be a powerful tool when disaster strikes as personal devices enable people to instantly amplify their experiences to a wider public audience, but according to the National Institute for Standards and Technology, most public safety personnel currently lack the technology and skills needed to effectively harness public, social platforms during emergencies.
In a strategic effort to advance research that it hopes will one day enable public safety-focused entities to tap social media analytics in emergency response, NIST’s Text Retrieval Conference, or TREC, Incident Streams project intends to gain access to Twitter’s Enterprise-Level application programming interface, or API.
“The vast majority of tweets associated with an emergency with a hashtag are wishes of support and discussion about the event,” agency officials wrote in a special notice published Tuesday. “However, on a much smaller scale, people in the emergency itself use Twitter to request aid, share resources, offer services, and provide first-hand reports of the situation.”
Through TREC’s Incident Streams effort, NIST scopes out and prioritizes tweets that occur amid natural crises according to an emergency response ontology, and subsequently invites research teams to develop software applications that can swiftly filter and classify the tweets. The agency produces an infrastructure to gauge how well the created systems perform and ultimately aims to speed up the assets’ improvement. The hope is that once the technologies mature, “such systems could drive analytic dashboards or decision-making processes in public safety organizations.”
However, NIST has used public APIs in this project to date, which insiders n ..
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