In the last years, social media have grown in popularity with millions of users that everyday produce and share online digital content. This practice reveals to be particularly useful in extra-ordinary context, such as during a disaster, when the data posted by people can be integrated with traditional emergency management tools and used for event detection and hyperlocal situational awareness. In this contribution, we present SVISAT, an innovative visualization system for Twitter data mining, expressly conceived for signaling in real time a given event through the uploading and sharing of visual information (i.e., photos). Using geodata, it allows to display on a map the wide area where the event is happening, showing at the same time the most popular hashtags adopted by people to spread the tweets and the most relevant images/photos which describe the event itself.
238Vernier, M., Farinosi, M. and Foresti, G. A Smart Visual Information Tool for Situational Awareness.