One of the most significant sources of Big Data is social media: a continuous feed of unstructured, unvalidated, near real-time information.

When a large city faces a crisis, such as a flood, earthquake, or riots, vast amounts of valuable information are generated on social media platforms like X and Facebook. However, emergency services currently lack established methods to monitor, filter and integrate this data into crisis management efforts.

The EmerGent Project: Transforming Social Media Data

As part of the European EmerGent project, we are developing a cloud-based emergency management service that will collect and analyse social media data during large-scale crises.

This service will transform the continuous stream of social media content into a relevant, consistent, and actionable data source to support effective crisis response.

According to a survey by the US Red Cross, social media is already the fourth most significant source of information during a crisis and is easily accessible for computing systems to capture and analyse.

Addressing Key Challenges In Social Media Data

But how can we quickly process terabytes of data? How do we handle text with misspellings or in multiple languages? Will we inadvertently generate false information, as occurred during the London riots? How can we present the data in a way that is easily understood? And how do we ensure citizen confidentiality while adhering to privacy laws?

To address these challenges, we are building upon the data mining tools and techniques for text-based analysis and mapping developed during the REACT project. As the EmerGent partner responsible for ensuring compliance with European Data Protection Laws, we are committed to using data ethically and legally.

The Future of the EmerGent Project

Beyond the project, we will support emergency services in integrating social media data into incident management and explore further opportunities for this technology to benefit governments and industries.

The EmerGent project is funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development, and demonstration, under grant agreement no. 608352.

Next Steps

To learn more about the positive impact we’re having on various settings, take a look at our collection of news and blogs.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Speak to one of our friendly specialists today.