Online Social Network as a Powerful Tool to Identify Experts for Emergency Management

摘要

Widespread use of social network has changed people's daily life as well as the way of emergency management. As a useful tool for information dissemination, communication and collaboration, social network plays an important role in the process of emergency management: mitigation, preparedness, communications, response and recovery. Emergency problem solving nowadays often need experts from various domain areas such as medicine, nuclear, chemistry, information technology and so on. It's difficult and costly for local emergency management databases to be well prepared since emergency disasters are small probability events. This research captures the advantage of social network to tackle such issues. Expertise on online social network is available and trustworthy with supervision of crowds. Therefore, we propose a method though the integration of social position analysis and expertise level analysis to profile online individuals. Social position analysis captures the importance or prominence of an individual in social network, and expertise level analysis measures one's expertise relevance and expertise level. Expert finding on online social can also capture one's interest in the specific emergency disaster. We also give an empirical analysis in a selected small group. Outperformed individuals can be identified. More work is needed to validate the method on the specified social network in the future.