SHELTER Social Media Data Engine (SMDE)

A thorough analysis of social media content can be extremely beneficial in the occurrence of major events, in order to obtain a broader and more comprehensive view on the upcoming emergency phenomena and their progression, by merging together communications from official agencies, press and citizens. Moreover, useful information can be obtained by careful filtering and data aggregation, with the aim of creating an event history and their impacts on the territory. The extracted content can then be exploited for a posterior analysis, so that the most critical areas can be identified, and pre-emptive interventions can be planned for the future. Given these premises, the primary objective is the implementation of a platform, able to automatically collect, categorize and aggregate real-time information from social media such as Twitter. The SMDE is a publicly reachable web service that has three main components: automated data gathering and ingestion, content categorization and event detection.