Review
Social media for intelligent public information and warning in disasters: An interdisciplinary review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2019.04.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The vision of intelligent public information and warning is identified.

  • Social media contributes to three functions of public information and warning.

  • Studies on communication phenomena and social media informatics are reviewed.

  • A research roadmap is proposed to address the challenges of achieving the vision.

Abstract

Social media offers participatory and collaborative structure and collective knowledge building capacity to the public information and warning approaches. Therefore, the author envisions the intelligent public information and warning in disaster based on social media, which has three functions: (1) efficiently and effectively acquiring disaster situational awareness information, (2) supporting self-organized peer-to-peer help activities, and (3) enabling the disaster management agencies to hear from the public. To achieve this vision, authors of this study examined 304 studies conducted 2008 through 2018 to systemically evaluate the current literature in understanding the phenomena of communication on social media and the state-of-the-art studies on social media informatics in disasters. This review then identified the challenges of existing studies and proposed a research roadmap to address the challenges of achieving the vision. This review could serve as a bridge for researchers working on social media in disasters to understand the state-of-the-art of this problem in other related domains. The findings of this review highlight the value of certain research areas, e.g., (1) a fine-grained disaster social media ontology with semantic interoperability, (2) network pattern of trending information and emerging influential users, (3) fine-grained assessment of societal impacts due to infrastructure disruptions, and (4) best practices for social media usage during disasters.

Section snippets

Intelligent public information and warning using social media: vision and review motivation

Communication of timely and reliable information, such as situational awareness and protective and preventative measures, in the face of devastating natural disasters, can mean the difference between life or death of disaster victims (Shklovski, Burke, Kiesler, & Kraut, 2010). Public information and warning is the delivery of “coordinated, prompt, reliable, and actionable information to the whole community through the use of clear, consistent, accessible, and culturally and linguistically

Understanding the phenomena of communication through social media in disasters

This section examines the phenomena of communication through social media in disasters from five aspects (Fig. 4): (1) the content of social media, (2) spatiotemporal patterns of social media usage distribution, (3) information dissemination patterns, (4) rumor and trust issues, and (5) public's experience of social media use.

Informatics techniques for analyzing social media data in disasters

This section presents the state-of-the-art techniques for retrieving and analyzing information content of social media posts for evaluating communities’ information sharing in disasters (Castillo, 2016) (Adam, Shafiq, & Staffin, 2012). This section will review the techniques used for social media informatics in three categories (Fig. 5): (1) information retrieval, (2) information integration, (3) information interpretation. These widely-used informatics techniques collectively support all three

Research roadmap for achieving the vision of intelligent public information and warning in disasters using social media

At the beginning of this review, the authors defined the Vision as a means to improve information flow and self-organization by the timely and effective exchange of situational information in a networked and decentralized manner among a population affected by a disaster. Studies of information dissemination and social media informatics techniques will support the three functions of the Vision, which are (1) enabling people to conveniently acquire disaster situational awareness information, (2)

Concluding remarks

Studies of social media and disasters have burgeoned in the last decade, and the review of existing studies can better guide researchers and planning entities to achieve better disaster management and response. This paper defines the vision of intelligent public information and warning in disasters then identifies three functions of this vision. To achieve these functions, the authors reviewed studies and identified challenges in understanding the phenomena of communication using social media

Statement of competing interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Acknowledgment

This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number IIS-1759537. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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