Exploring a landslide inventory created by automated web data mining: the case of Italy

Abstract

Nowadays, several systems to set up landslide inventories exist although they rarely rely on automated or real-time updates. Mass media can provide reliable info about natural hazard events with a relatively high temporal and spatial resolution. The news publication about a natural disaster inside newspaper or crowdsourcing platforms allows a faster observation, survey, and classification of these phenomena. Several techniques have been developed for data mining inside social media for many natural events, but they have been rarely applied to the automatic extraction of “landslide events”. This source of information allows continuous feedback from real world, and news concerning landslide events can be rapidly collected. In this work, the newspaper articles about landslides in Italy are automatically collected by an existing data mining algorithm, based on a semantic engine. The news has been analysed to assess their distribution over the territory and to verify the possibility of using them for hazard mapping purpose. In 10 years, from 2010 to 2019, the algorithm identified and geolocated 184322 articles referring to 32525 generical events (“news”). At first, the collected data underwent to a manual verification, followed by a classification based on news relevance, localization accuracy and time of publication. Then, these data have been used to identify the areas and the periods most affected by landslide phenomena. The analyses show that almost 42% of Italian municipalities have been affected by landslide. According to the results, the use of data mining is helpful for the creation of landslide databases where the day and the approximative location (municipality) of the possible landslide triggers are known. This database, in turn, can be used for scientific purposes, as the definition of the meteorological condition associated with landslide initiation, the validation of risk maps. It can also be used for a proper land use or risk mitigation planning, since the most landslide-prone municipalities can be defined.