Disasters seen through Flickr cameras

Abstract

Collecting aftermath information after a wide-area disaster is a crucial task in the disaster response that requires important human resources. We propose to assist reconnaissance teams by extracting useful data sent by the users of social networks that experienced the disaster. In particular we consider the photo sharing website Flickr as a source of information that allows one to evaluate the disaster aftermath. We propose a methodology to detect major event occurrences from the behavior of Flickr users and describe the nature of these events from the tags they post on the Flickr website. Our experiments using two study cases, namely, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and the Tuscaloosa tornado, reveals the value of the data published by Flickr users and highlight the value of social networks in disaster response.