Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief (HA/DR) Social Media Analytics Tools

We participated in the FEMA National Level Exercise 2011 which staged a New Madrid fault earthquake event. Our role was to support a Crisis Management Decision Support System (DSS) used by NORTHCOM to manage FEMA Mission Assignments. A primary finding was the need to"integrate social media monitoring and reporting into the overall operational picture"akin to this topic"s objectives. The plan is to leverage our Clinical Surveillance DSS that employs innovated Ontology-based NLP, crowdsourcing and cloud services technologies for syndromic surveillance use-cases the initial prototype will address health risks caused by disasters. There are hundreds of social media analytics within academia, and the open and commercial marketplace that will be researched and evaluated, with openness being a strong criterion. A mashup type open architecture will be developed to allow end users to seamlessly plug in new or improved text analytics algorithms. Processed tweets will be integrated collaborative, social mapping applications and technologies. Social engineering techniques and gradient scale methodology will be used to assess information trust. The fundamental approach is initiate tweets as untrusted, whereby trust levels are increased based on various measures such as information source/mention, circumstances around tweet flow and linked conversations, and secondary social media channels.