Comprehensive Wikipedia monitoring for global and realtime natural disaster detection

Natural disasters are harmful events resulting from natural processes of the Earth. Examples of natural disasters include tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, droughts, and other geologic processes. If they affect populated areas, natural disasters can cause economic damage, injuries, or even losses of lives. It is thus desirable that natural disasters be detected as early as possible and potentially affected persons be notified via emergency alerts. By their pure nature, natural disasters are global phenomena that people refer to by different names, for example, the 2014 typhoon Rammasun is known as typhoon Glenda in the Philippines. In this paper, we present our ongoing early-stage research on a realtime Wikipedia-based monitoring system for the detection of natural disasters around the globe. The long-term objective is to make data about natural disasters detected by this system available through public alerts following the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP).