On Integrating Social and Sensor Networks for 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, and their integration with appropriate sensor networks presents itself as an effective solution to drive decision making in emergency management. In this paper, we present a review of existing disaster management systems and their underlying strategies and technologies, and identify the limitations of the tools in which they are implemented. We then propose an architecture for disaster management that integrates the mining of social networks and the use of sensor networks as two complementary technologies to overcome the limitations of the current emergency management tools.