Enablers in Crisis Information Management: A Literature Review

Abstract

Social media often plays a central role in crisis informatics as it is an important source for assessing, understanding, and locating crises quickly and accurately. In addition, social media enables actors to react more effectively and efficiently when managing crises. However, enablers of crisis information management have not been carved out explicitly in a systematic view. Therefore, we perform a literature review to synthesize the existing literature on crisis information management with a focus on technical enablers and their classification into the crisis-management phases. As our results show, searching for crisis informatics mostly results in social media-related publications. We found that Twitter is one of the most important technical enablers but that research on other social media platforms is underrepresented. Also, most publications center on the post-crisis phases of crisis management, leaving out the pre-crisis phases.

Persistent physics-based crisis management framework: A case study of traffic in the Nantes city due to flood exposure

“…The crisis management framework studies the crisis in three stages, (i) Management Phases include a loop of pre-crisis (Preparedness), during the crisis (Response), and the post-crisis (Recovery and Mitigation). (ii) Interaction between crisis respondents (Public, Organizations), and (iii) Information Management Enablers (Information Collection, Communication, and Collaboration) [13]. Damage by flood hazards depends on the vulnerability of exposed elements.…”

Prominent quality attributes of crisis software systems: a literature review

“…Crisis informatics is an emerging research field that aims to respond to emergencies by addressing sociotechnical concerns with consideration to include not only official responders but also members of the public in support of emergency response [2]. Crisis informatics researchers study how members of the public use cuttingedge information and communications technologies and social media during emergencies, explore how publicly available social media data can be beneficial for supporting crisis management and response, and examine how the public can be encouraged to act collaboratively during mass emergencies to increase situational awareness that indicates the desired manner of individuals and the public to comprehend difficulties of an emergency and act consciously [13,14]. In the crisis informatics literature, time-oriented crisis management is presented in four phases: preparation (mitigation), warning (preparedness), response, and recovery.…”

The Usage of Twitter Data for Early Crisis Detection

“…Existing research in the context of using social media for crisis management focuses on the development of automated systems and algorithms to gather information from social media to support response and recovery activities in later stages of a disaster [4,12]. Although it is stated, that social media can benefit in all phases of the crisis management cycle, including the pre-crisis phase, most research focuses on postcrisis phases.…”

“…Social media has become an important medium in particular during disaster situations [2,3]. There is a growing consensus about the fact that social media can be valuable for emergency services in all disaster phases [4][5][6][7]. But other than the use of social media in crisis response, only little is known about the use of social media for Emergency Management Agencies (EMAs) in the early detection of a crisis [4][5][6].…”

“…There is a growing consensus about the fact that social media can be valuable for emergency services in all disaster phases [4][5][6][7]. But other than the use of social media in crisis response, only little is known about the use of social media for Emergency Management Agencies (EMAs) in the early detection of a crisis [4][5][6]. By having the knowledge of how to detect a crisis and how to gather these data in timecritical events, unleash the potential to minimize the damages and possibly save lives.…”