Supporting Crisis Management via Sub-event Detection in Social Networks

Social networks give the opportunity to gather and share knowledge about a situation of relevance. This so called user-generated content is getting increasingly important during crisis management. It facilitates the collaboration with citizens or parties involved from the very beginning of the crisis. The information captured in form of images, text or videos is a valuable source of identifying sub-events of a crisis. In this study, we use metadata of images and videos collected from Flickr and YouTube to extract sub-events in crisis situations. We investigate the suitability of clustering techniques to detect sub-events. In particular two algorithms are evaluated on several data sets related to crisis situations. The results show the high potential of the approach proposed.