Description:
The Social Media in Crisis Management Workshop was held in the European Crisis Management Laboratory (ECML) of the Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, from 11 to 12 October 2016. The aim of the workshop was to investigate the potentiality of Social Media services in Crisis Management with major experts like system providers and end users. We wanted to examine together the state-of-the-art of this kind of tools, to investigate their technological background, and to find common ways to fill the existing gaps. People affected by natural disasters seek and share information through Social Networking websites (SNs). In the same way, governments and response agencies could rely on Social Media to get firsthand information and thanks to this, for example, coordinate relief efforts, as shown in 2010 during the Haiti earthquake or in the case of the Haiyan Tropical Cyclone in Philippines of 2013. Are first responders ready to deal with big crisis data? How can the surge of information during disasters turn into an information crisis? In this context, understanding the needs of different stakeholders (from tool providers to end users) is vital to explore two interrelated dimensions, at least: the technical domain and the social perspective.