Curating Resource Needs and Availabilities from Microblog During a Natural Disaster

Abstract

In the past few years, the role of Online Social Media in disaster resilience in India is being increased significantly. The importance of social media sites like Twitter during various mass emergencies is being advocated by various researchers and practitioners. Recent floods in Chennai and Kerala have proven the key role of microblogging sites like Twitter in providing relief operations to a great extent. In the context of any natural disasters, the primary goal of relief operations is to save human life by providing various types of life-saving resources in the affected region. The primary objective of this work is to curate the urgent requirement of several categories of resources in a flood-affected region in India in a timeline of one month. We have adopted a semi-automatic pattern matching approach for the present study. We utilized tweets posted during the recent flood in Chennai (2015) for our present experiment. The acumens of this experiment will help in preparedness planning in upcoming flood events in India.