Social Media Monitoring Tool for Emergency Management

The Christchurch earthquake and Queensland flooding brought social media to the forefront in 2012.  With that there is more interest in helping emergency management agencies in Australia be able to mine social media for the nuggets of good information that will assist them is responding to and recovering from disasters.

 

See this news release below that I'm quoting in almost its entirety.  It will give you a flavor of how companies are working to identify pertinent information from the flood of social media dialog that is happening everyday.  Of course this type of software would have applications way beyond emergency management to support private business needs.  

 

SA, Australia

South Australian companies Sirenus and Semantic Sciences have signed an agreement to collaborate in the development of the Sirenus social media monitoring tool for emergency management and disaster relief.


South Australian software companies Sirenus and Semantic Sciences have signed an memorandum of understanding to collaborate in the development of the Sirenus social media monitoring tool for emergency management and disaster relief.

 

"This is an exciting advance in the development of Sirenus. Semantic Sciences's product Sintelix will provide key natural language processing capability to Sirenus to help it to sift through the massive amounts of information generated on online social networks during emergencies." said Sirenus CEO Leith Mudge.


"It will allow emergency managers to find the needle of useful information in a haystack of noise and misinformation and transform that into potentially life saving actionable information." he said.


"Organisations such as the Red Cross have trouble dealing with huge volumes of data generated on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook during disasters. The experience with Superstorm Sandy in the US was a watershed for this sort of technology with over 20 million storm related Tweets posted on Twitter alone." Leith said.


Sintelix natural language processing software has been independently verified by the US Air Force to be the best in its' class at automatically processing and making sense of large amounts of text information such as social media posts.


"We are very pleased to partner with Sirenus to allow our technology to be incorporated into an innovative application with such a positive social impact." said Semantic Sciences CEO Dr Daniel McMichael.

About Sirenus Pty Ltd

Sirenus Pty Ltd is a South Australian software company formed to develop enterprise cloud and mobile applications with a focus on real-time situational awareness from social media and other forms of crowdsourcing. Sirenus applies Big Data techniques to this challenging problem. Sirenus Pty Ltd was a finalist in the 2011 Telstra Innovation Challenge.

About Semantic Sciences Pty Ltd

Semantic Sciences Pty Ltd is a South Australian software company formed to establish a new level of accuracy in text analytics and information integration. The company spun out from CSIRO, Australia's leading civilian laboratory, in 2008. It proceeded to apply the expertise of its core staff in statistical algorithm design, mathematics, and software engineering to create Sintelix, an outstanding unstructured data analysis system.