An Ontology for the Use of Quality Evaluated Social Media Data in Emergencies

As social media services are on the rise, people increasingly share information about emergencies on social media. Sometimes information about disasters even finds its way faster to social media websites than it reaches regular news companies and emergency services. Yet emergency services still have not found a way to put this potential to an effective use. Within our project “EmerGent”, we are developing a system for emergency services to process and analyse information from social media. The goal is to collect the vast amount of data generated in social networks during a crisis, evaluate the quality of this information and to transform the high volume of noisy data into a low volume of rich content that can be presented to emergency personnel in a useful manner. In this paper, we describe the steps taken during the development process of an ontology that covers the fields of social media and emergency management (SMEM) and the structure of this ontology itself. Also a solution for the measurement and description of information quality in form of a graph is explained, where an overall information quality value is calculated based on several criteria and indicators.