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With the massive amounts of information produced via social media managing and making sense of data is a big challenge.  Particularly during an emergency, the ability for first responders and law enforcement to process and analyze information can greatly increase their decision-making. SensePlace2 was recently identified by social media and emergency management blog, idisaster 2.0, as an emergency capability that collects essential information during, increase situational awareness, and allows for swift communication between government and citizen.

The tool, which is being developed by the GeoVista Center at Penn State University, allows for sensemaking of information collected from Twitter. The application allows for the collection of geospatial information and other data and translates it for out onto a map. This enables better situational awareness, allowing law enforcement of emergency responders to identify locations and easily filter through data on by place or time.

The GeoVista Center has applied a visual analytics perspective to develop and implement visually-enabled information foraging and sensemaking tools for leveraging data made publicly available in social media. SensePlace2 has been designed to integrate multiple text sources (e.g., news, RSS, blog posts).  SensePlace2 uses a crawler to systematically query the Twitter API for tweets containing any topics deemed to be of interest. Each tweet is then processed and key information (locations, organizations, persons, hashtags, URLs etc.) is extracted.

SensePlace2 is a map-based web application. The client side of the application supports overview and detail maps of tweets, place-time-attribute filtering of tweets, and analysis of changing issues and perspectives over time and across space as reflected in tweets. The default SensePlace2 interface (shown below) includes a query window, map, time-plot /control, relevance-ranked list of tweets, and task list. The primary display views (map, time-plot/control, and tweet list) are dynamically coordinated. Our approach is user-centered using scenario-based methods to guide design and validate implementation The current SensePlace2 architecture and user interface reflect user input from a structured survey of emergency management practitioners.

For the original article, please visit: http://idisaster.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/processing-and-analyzing-social-media-in-a-crisis/