E2mC: Improving rapid mapping with social network information

E2mC aims to demonstrate the technical and operational feasibility of the integration of social media analysis and crowdsourced information within both the Rapid Mapping and Early Warning Components of Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS). Copernicus is a European Commission programme developing information services based on satellite earth observation. A fundamental innovation with E2mC is to combine the automated analysis of social media information with crowdsourcing, with the general goal of improving the quality and dependability of the information provided to professional users within the Copernicus network. The automated analyses will focus on multimedia information (mainly pictures), which is most useful for rapid mapping purposes. A fundamental challenge to enable the effective use of multimedia information is geolocation. The paper presents a methodology to extract, integrate and geolocate information from social media and leverage the crowd to clean, validate and complement this information. Preliminary results from testing the methodology are presented based on the analysis of tweets on the earthquake that struck Central Italy in August 2016.