Integration of Heterogeneous Information Sources for an Effective Emergency Management

Recently social networks have been playing a key role in emergency management. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti is often referred to as the turning point that changed the way social media can be used during disasters. The development of strategies, technologies and tools to enhance user collaboration around disasters has become an emergent field, that has triggered the integration of different technologies in order to efficiently drive decision making in emergency management. In this article we critically review the existing strategies and technologies for emergency management and outline a new approach based on the functional integration of the mining of social networks with capabilities of sensor networks to collect data and of a specific telecommunication system to exchange information in a secure and reliable mode. In particular, the focus here will be on different strategies for decision support and for alert and information dissemination. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by discussing its performance in relation to a specific implementation in a system for the prevention and the management of natural disasters developed during the framework of the WiLIFE research project.