Use of social media and open source data to enhance situational awareness in the Austrian crisis and disaster management

Advanced situational awareness is a central element of today's crisis and disaster management and the basis of improved decision-making. A prerequisite for optimised decision-making is to quickly obtain valid information about the specific crisis in the affected area. At the same time, a high demand for information arises from the media and the population. It is therefore necessary to collect, process and distribute valid information in the shortest possible time. In this context, the KIRAS project iLike focuses on the development of a demonstrator of an intelligent situation information portal that uses open-data information sources and channels for decision support. The demonstrator has two key central functionalities, namely event detection and sentiment analysis. This paper describes the architecture and key functionalities of the iLike demonstrator.