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| (Twitcident) |
Dutch
researchers have developed a system that will allow emergency service workers
to get all the information they need to respond to an emergency from Twitter.
The application will be presented at the World Wide Web 2012 conference in the
French city of Lyon later this week.
The
application is called Twitcident and was created by an Amsterdam company in
collaboration with researchers at the University of Delft and the Netherlands
Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO). The researchers created an
algorithm that finds and filters all the relevant tweets sent during a major
incident.
When a
major disaster occurs, people start tweeting about it immediately. Most of the
tweets don't contain anything relevant or they are a re-tweet of an earlier
item. However, some of the tweets do have information that would be of use to
the police, the fire service, ambulance workers or search and rescue teams.
Useful
information
Twitcident
gathers the useful information and publishes it on a website. This allows the
emergency services to quickly access information about the nature of the
incident, the location, the number of victims and the state of roads leading to
the site. The emergency services will be able to get a better idea about the
situation through maps, photos and statistics on the Twitcident site.
Fabian
Abel, one of Twitcident's developers, says filtering the relevant and important
information out of the welter of tweets is the real challenge: "Of course,
there is a huge difference between someone saying that he burnt his tongue or
saying that the house burnt down. But the system is intelligent enough
differentiate between the two tweets."
The system
can be used anywhere in the world for any kind of emergency, including
earthquakes, floods or riots. Organisers of large events and festivals can also
use the system. At the end of this month, the system will be put to the test
during Queen's Day in the Netherlands. Hundreds of thousands of people take to
the streets on the Dutch national holiday and many of them will have had one or
two beers. Twitcident could prove useful in keeping an eye on things.
Authoritarian
regimes
An
algorithm that filters Twitter feeds could be a tool of oppression in the hands
of authoritarian regimes; it could be used to monitor political opponents and
crackdown on dissent. Fabian Abel: "I don't think that the system is open
to abuse. It just doesn't work like that. We only put the algorithm to work
after the authorities or emergency services contact us and ask us to monitor an
incident. We want this to work for public safety; it's something we've
developed to help save lives during major accidents or disasters."
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