Exploring the Geographical Relations Between Social Media and Flood Phenomena to Improve Situational Awareness - A Study About the River Elbe Flood in June 2013

Recent research has shown that social media platforms like twitter can provide relevant information to improve situation awareness during emergencies. Previous work is mostly concentrated on the classification and analysis of tweets utilizing crowdsourcing or machine learning techniques. However, managing the high volume and velocity of social media messages still remains challenging. In order to enhance information extraction from social media, this chapter presents a new approach that relies upon the geographical relations between twitter data and flood phenomena. Our approach uses specific geographical features like hydrological data and digital elevation models to prioritize crisis-relevant twitter messages. We apply this approach to examine the River Elbe Flood in Germany in June 2013. The results show that our approach based on geographical relations can enhance information extraction fromvolunteered geographic information, thus being valuable for both crisis response and preventive flood monitoring.