Linking and visualizing social media data about crises

Making sense out of data is a crucial process in decision making. This is especially so when it is for saving lives in crises and disasters like earthquakes, oodings or forestres. Social media is a prominent source for human observations about disasters. Linking these crowdsourced observations together with SMS messages sent to aid phone numbers carry potential information about not only buldings collapsed or roads blocked, but also about people in need for medical services, food and water. This calls for linking the dierent pieces of information together by making temporal, spatial and thematic references explicit and groupable. We argue that this supports information usability and would thus create grounds for decision making. Examples of social media data and its handling about the earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010 serve in this to illustrate both the research problems and solutions.