Automated geographic context analysis for volunteered information

In this paper, we present the GeoCONAVI (Geographic CONtext Analysis for Volunteered Information) approach and a prototype system, designed to retrieve, process, analyze and evaluate social media content on forest fires, producing relevant, credible and actionable VGI usable for crisis events. The novelty of the approach lies in the enrichment of the content with additional geographic context information, and use of spatio-temporal clustering to support scoring and validation. Thus, the system is focusing on integrating authoritative data sources with VGI. Evaluation in case studies shows that the prototype system can handle large amounts of data with common-off-the-shelf hardware, produces valuable results, and is adaptable to other types of crisis events.