During and after crisis situations people are interested in getting knowledge about what happened and in obtaining information regarding damages, victims, and possible repercussions. Social network systems represent powerful sources due to their rapid growth in the last few years and the amount of continuous updated information published by people. Studies confirmed that people are interested in reporting facts during hazards, however due to the wide distribution of information and the lack of mechanisms to re-use it, it is an awkward task to be accomplished. For the above reasons in this paper we present SocialStory, a social platform for helping people to retrieve and filter materials available on the Internet and to compose and share personal experiences about crisis situations.
Crowdsourcing is a distributed approach in which people participate and share information over the Web (e.g. Facebook or Twitter). This distributed model has proved to be helpful in accelerating the perception of what occurred, where it happened, and who needed help in recent disasters such as the Boston Marathon bombs, the Oklahoma tornado or the Central Europe floods. Nevertheless, this kind of sources might provide unreliable, partial, ambiguous and inconsistent information that do not necessarily help to understand the situation. An alternative may be the combination of crowdsourcing activities and more official flows of information to make up a coherent big picture that support the needs of decision makers. This paper introduces a software approach conceived to convey stories created from different sources –official and unofficial- as a way of depicting situations in a collaborative manner.
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