Comparing web feeds and tweets for emergency management

This paper describes ongoing work with the Australian Government to assemble information from a collection of web feeds describing emergency incidents of interest for emergency managers. The developed system, the Emergency Response Intelligence Capability (ERIC) tool, has been used to gather information about emergency events during the Australian summer of 2012/13. The web feeds are an authoritative source of structured information summarising incidents that includes links to emergency services web sites containing further details about the events underway. The intelligence obtained using ERIC for a specific fire event has been compared with information that was available in Twitter using the Emergency Situation Awareness (ESA) platform. This information would have been useful as a new source of intelligence: it was reported faster than via the web feed, contained more specific event information, included details of impact to the community, was updated more frequently, included information from the public and remains available as a source of information long after the web feed contents have been removed.