While social media has often been of assistance in coordinating disaster responses, the sheer amount of information available on the various platforms can be overwhelming. To help distill the various posts into a more usable format, researchers at Purdue have recently developed a tool called SMART (Social Media Analytics and Reporting Toolkit), reports Science Daily. Designed as a browser-based platform, this tool allows the user to filter social media content through both key words and geographic regions, to target areas of interest.
While other tools have previously been designed with similar goals, the Purdue tool adds features allowing for display of the distribution of tweets and posts for a given geographical region, and has been tested in conjunction with events like crime investigations, natural disasters, and various public events. The tool also offers customizable email alerts, allowing users to specify terms and frequencies which would trigger an email updating them of the occurrence.
Director of Purdue’s Visual Analytics for Command, Control and Interoperability Environments (VACCINE) center David Ebert says of SMART, “People already provide information about situations using social media. Organizing and filtering this information helps first responders attend to certain areas faster.”
Source:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180424160236.htm
