Location-Based Insights from the Social Web

Citizens, news reporters, relief organizations, and governments are increasingly relying on the Social Web to report on and respond to disasters as they occur. The capability to rapidly react to important events, which can be identified from high-volume streams even when the sources are unknown, still requires precise localization of the events and verification of the reports. In this paper, we propose a framework for classifying location elements and a method for their extraction from Social Web data. We describe the framework in the context of existing Social Web systems used for disaster management. We present a new location-inferencing architecture and evaluate its performance with a data set from a real-world disaster.