Flood Tags

 

 Social-Ecological Urban Analysis

An integrated, resilience-disaster management approach is intended to support Semarang city planning, contributing to more informed decision making for issues including flooding and water quality, while also serving as a pilot method and decision support tool to be leveraged in other South Asian cities as part of the Resilient Coastal Cities project.  Components of the analysis include social media data from FloodTags and Peta Bencana, ecological data from TNC and Wetlands International, and socioeconomic data from Mercy Corps.

 

 

Flood Tags

FloodTags is a social enterprise with its headquarters in The Hague, The Netherlands. Together with researchers from universities and institutes, they develop and implement software to analyse online media content, aimed at deriving useful information for water and development projects. FloodTags started with Twitter, but can now perform event extraction on all text-based media, such as news articles, blogs, forums, Twitter and Facebook public pages. They do this for real-time and historic (trend) analysis of floods, water scarcity, water conflict, integrated water management, food security and other water- and development related topics.

FloodTags was identified by the coalition as a useful tool that identifies and consumes large amounts of social media data where flood events are happening and the connection between upstream and downstream impacts. Earlier studies of FloodTags showed the potential for flood monitoring in Indonesia, where up to hundreds of thousands of tweets are shared about new floods happening (without anyone asking those people to tweet).

As part of this project, Flood Tags will contribute the following:

  • Identify new flood events for the North Coast of Central Java in the upcoming flood season November, 2017- April, 2018, on the basis of Twitter data — with emphasis on Semarang
  • Per identified flood event, provide the related Twitter content and summarize the known characteristics (time, location, most frequent words and hashtags)
  • Per identified flood event, determine the uncertainty (of it being a flood event) and suggest whether (the extent to which) further validation of the flood is required, either by manual validation or data combinations
  • Share results via an API that can be accessed by Coastal Resilience – Cities Mapping Portal
  • Share results via the existing online FloodTags Dashboard in which further analysis of the data can be performed