News

EmerGent Review Meeting: successful project completion

The final review meeting of the European research project EmerGent (Emergency Management in Social Media Generation) took place on September 7th,2017 at the Dortmund Fire Brigade’s training centre. During the runtime of the project, the ten project partners have investigated the positive and negative influence of social media on emergency response. In addition to the presentation of significant research results, a live demonstration of the EmerGent IT system was held on the training grounds of the Dortmund Fire Brigade.

The project’s results have been published in a variety of scientific publications and reports and presented at numerous conferences. All public reports and publications can be found in the publications section of our website.

EmerGent achieved all its goals and milestones, including:

  • Assessment of the impact of social media in emergencies for emergency services (EMS) and citizens
  • Conduction of representative studies to assess the potentials of social media in emergencies for EMS and citizens as well as to evaluate their attitudes towards social media
  • Development of information mining methods to extract valuable information from social media data
  • Development and evaluation of a model for measuring and analysing information quality
  • Creation of a semantic data model for structuring information from social networks and linking it to emergency domain knowledge
  • Design and implementation of tools and methods for EMS and citizens to enable direct and indirect two-way communication, f.e. an application to report emergencies and supply information to authorities and an interface for EMS, providing tools for enhanced social media data visualisation, filtering and communication
  • Conduction of a dissemination and marketing campaign to engage users
  • Development of guidelines to increase the benefit of social media in emergencies for EMS and citizens

The project was coordinated by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rainer Koch and Matthias Habdank, M. Sc., from the University of Paderborn. Besides the University of Paderborn, the following project partners were involved in the EmerGent project:

 

University of Paderborn

Oxford Computer Consultants

University of Siegen

Tavistock Institute of Human Relations

European Emergency Number Association

Stiftinga Vestlandsforsking

Intelligence for Environment and Security

Federation of the European Union Fire Officer Associations

City of Dortmund Fire Brigade

Centrum Naukowo-Badawcze Ochrony Przeciwpożarowj

 

D7.2 and D7.3 have been finalized

Another two deliverables have been completed by the EmerGent consortium and can be reviewed under the Publications section of our website.

Deliverable 7.2 describes dissemination and marketing campaigns in order to spark interest in EmerGent, the EmerGent Mobile App 112.social and EmerGent’s stakeholders.

Deliverable 7.3 summarises the findings and conclusions of EmerGent in the form of guidelines for end users for increasing the benefit of social media use during emergencies. It provides a list of recommendations for emergency services and citizens on how to make the most of social media use, explore and benefit from the opportunities offered and take the necessary steps to achieve a smooth and beneficial use of this medium.

D4.8 and D5.6 have been finalized

Two new deliverables have been finished by the EmerGent consortium.

D4.8 describes the implementation of the Processing and Analysis Subsystem (PAS) of EmerGent, which contains the data enrichment, information mining (IM) and information quality (IQ) components. This document expands on D4.6 by describing how the designs therein have been incorporated into a live system. It describes a processing pipeline based on association of components by a simple standard RESTful interface as well as a controller that coordinates the operation of the pipeline. The input of the system is a batch of messages collected from various social media channels. The output will have been filtered to improve relevance and augmented with useful information on the quality of information supplied. The system is intended to be used alongside a user interface component that presents the results of processing and allows the parameters of the processing pipeline to be altered.

D5.6 as a technical document provides an updated version of implementation and verification activities performed after D5.5 publication. The main components of the EmerGent IT system analysed in this document are the EmerGent Mobile APP (EMA) and ES interface (ESI), even if additional components such as the Dissemination Service (DS) and the Processing and Analysis Subsystem (PAS) are briefly described to explain how they interact with EMA and ESI.

The second Newsletter is now available

The second newsletter representing the latest findings from the EmerGent project is available.  http://newsletters.fp7-emergent.eu/t/j-e-kihthyl-mairgtu-jh/

If you your’e not already registered you can do this at http://newsletters.fp7-emergent.eu/h/j/20B95B63ADF73631

 

Emergent at the 13th International Conference on Web Based Communities and Social Media

At the 13th International Conference on Web Based Communities and Social Media the paper of the Emergent project “Design of an Ontology for the Use of Social Media in Emergency Management” was selected for the “Best Paper Award”.

Here a modular, semantic data model was developed to serve as a domain overlapping link for connecting information from social media with data relevant in emergency situations.

D2.3 has been finalized – Impact of Social Media for EMS and citizens

The Deliverable D2.3 has been finished by the EmerGent consortium and is available under the Publications section of our website. The specific objective of this Deliverable is to develop and update the Theory of Change presented in D2.1 and to test out and extend the hypotheses developed through the initial case study of the London riots presented in D2.2.

D3.7, D4.7 and D7.7 have been finalized

Three new deliverables have been finished by the EmerGent consortium and can be reviewed under the Publications section of our website.

Deliverable 3.7 is the result of the Tasks 3.5 “Analysis of potentials of citizens’ involvement in the EMC” and 3.7 “Analysis of potentials using social media for Emergency Services in the EMC”. The Deliverable is a public document and is available for download.

Based on the user requirements presented in D3.4, the aim of Deliverable 4.7 is to develop a flexible visualisation and filtering concept that can be applied to the three aspects of visualisation and filtering in EmerGent (visualisation framework for researchers, ES interface, Citizens app) as well as social media data visualisation and filtering for emergencies in general.

Deliverable 7.7 provides a description of the European Data Protection and Privacy laws relevant to the EmerGent Project.

D2.6 Workshops I and II

This deliverable describes the activities and results of the two EAB workshops and how they have been integrated into the project.

Workshop on Virtual Operation Supporting Teams

Representatives of the EmerGent project participated at this years “Virtual Operations Support Teams” (VOST) and “Virtual Operations Management Teams” (VOMT) Workshop in Hamburg, Germany. During the workshop, different aspects about social media for the use of hazard prevention were discussed.  The VOST intends to evaluate social media during a disaster situation to support the appraisal of the situation. This workshop was for experts and was based on the previous DGSMTech. This year the focus was at operational tactics. The insight of the EmerGent project contributed to the workshop, so that it was possible to test this during the Hamburg Marathon.

D4.2 and D4.4 have been finalized

D4.2 provides an updated Semantic Data Model and a sophisticated ontology that models and processesses emergency related information semantically. Another update is handed in with D4.4 that provides unique information mining techniques transforming high quantity low quality data into high quality low quantity Information. For further information check the summaries provided in the Publication section of our web presence.