Construction of a Twitter Client Dedicated to Reporting Disaster Damage Situation s with a Function of Automatic Geotag and Hashtag Attaching and Disaster Related Tweet s Mapping System

Abstract

When a large-scale disaster occurs, collecting and providing disaster relevant information on such as evacuation warnings is quite meaningful for preventing the damage from spreading. It is known that when the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred in 2011 in Japan, numbers of people utilized Twitter and it was reported that approximately 80% of Twitter users regarded Twitter as a utilitarian tool for gathering emergency information. However, it is difficult for the people who are not familiar with the use of Twitter to report disaster situations accurately. Moreover it is also difficult for them to gather information by utilizing Twitter. Then, in this study, we construct a Twitter client dedicated to reporting disaster damage situations with a function of attaching geotag (longitude and latitude information), hashtag for reporting disaster situations which indicates the municipality of the user’s current place, and address based on the position information of the user automatically. We also construct a system which displays disaster situation reporting tweets in the neighborhood of user’s current position by plotting on a map.