A Framework for Dealing Collaboratively with Interactions from Social Media in Emergency Situations

in recent years, the use of social media has shown extraordinary growth for many purposes, including popular participation in emergency situations. Social media bring spontaneous participation of citizens, especially those who live or work near the occurrence of events. The set of those interactions provides valuable information for the rescue teams. Although valuable, there are difficulties to extract and integrate them into the work routine of emergency professionals. Some of the most important difficulties are associated with the large number of messages, the timing between the events, the sending of messages and the lack of standards. Understanding the roles and relationships arising from those interactions is an important starting point for the development of information systems that support rescue teams. That suggests the development of a framework for dealing collaboratively with social media interactions in emergencies, supporting the rescue teams in capturing, selecting, treating, and responding to the messages. The proposed structure could be used in the development of tools with the ability to integrate rescue teams and the crowd.