Crowdsourcing based social media data analysis of urban emergency events

An urban emergency event requires an immediate reaction or assistance for an emergency situation. With the popularity of the World Wide Web, the internet is becoming a major information provider and disseminator of emergency events and this is due to its real-time, open, and dynamic features. However, faced with the huge, disordered and continuous nature of web resources, it is impossible for people to efficiently recognize, collect and organize these events. In this paper, a crowdsourcing based burst computation algorithm of an urban emergency event is developed in order to convey information about the event clearly and to help particular social groups or governments to process events effectively. A definition of an urban emergency event is firstly introduced. This serves as the foundation for using web resources to compute the burst power of events on the web. Secondly, the different temporal features of web events are developed to provide the basic information for the proposed computation algorithm. Moreover, the burst power is presented to integrate the above temporal features of an event. Empirical experiments on real datasets show that the burst power can be used to analyze events.