application for disaster situational awareness to make you a smarter citizen
Overview
The purpose of this project is to establish a system which collects and analyzes big data to aid in disaster relief efforts. Following the events of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, it was evident many informative tweets of victims went unnoticed. As people continue to use social media platforms as their main platform to express their situation during a disaster, establishing a system which can make use of those tweets is a breakthrough in disaster rescue and relief.
The prototype developed can pull tweets live, mine and analyze the tweets, and then display to the user areas which need relief and the kind of need they need. This development will significantly enhance the capabilities of first responder and volunteers.
Our Products
See It is a collection of videos created by DisasterIQ team to inform users how to utilize Twitter in a way that provides informative tweets for data collection. The first video provides background on this project and its goals. There is also a series of videos featuring different components of a useful tweet such as turning on geolocation, structuring a tweet, and using appropriate hashtags. The succeeding video discusses how to identify an oncoming natural disaster/hazardous conditions and the final video teaches users how to navigate the website and extensions.
This component of our system allows a user to access real time disaster-related information crawled from Twitter and Google. Through this feature, our users can actively choose areas of interest by zooming in or out and tweets will automatically stream on a map. By doing so, tweets and information pertaining to how that area has been affected by a natural disaster show up. If a user is looking for even more specific information, TweetIt has a filtering component to where words can be typed so TweetIt can find all related tweets to the words typed.
By using twitter stream API, we can connect tweets from multiple areas simultaneously. All the collected tweets are stored in the Mongo DB database, which will be fed to the system and displayed on the website for users.
