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A joint NSF and JST Workshop: Examining and Prioritizing Collaborative Research Opportunities in Big Data and Disaster Research Washington, D.C., USA, May 23-24, 2013

Workshop website: https://grait-dm.gatech.edu/nsf-jst-workshop-may-23-24-2013/

A team composed of scientists from each Japan and the USA will meet May 23-24, 2013 in Washington, D.C. The ultimate goal of this workshop is to provide a consensus report that identifies and prioritizes key strategic areas where Research on Big Data and Disaster Research offers the greatest opportunity to advance novel scientific knowledge, and to foster greater collaborative interactions between Japan and US scientists in these priority research areas. This report will be considered by NSF and JST in developing future and joint Research Funding Announcements. The workshop will emphasize basic science and fundamental discovery as well as innovations for resilient and sustainable society.

Attendance to this workshop is by invitation only and space is limited. If you are interested in attending and have not been invited, please contact Prof. Calton Pu at for further information.

DBpedia is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created as part of the Wikipedia project. Wikipedia articles consist mostly of free text, but also include structured information embedded in the articles, such as “infobox” tables, categorisation information, images, geo-coordinates and links to external Web pages. This structured information is extracted and put in a uniform dataset which can be queried.

DBpedia also provides its datasets in a downloadable format. One of the most relevant downloads for our project is geographic coordinates: see here.

Our team has added a couple of sample feeds to the portal – see Twitter and YouTube feeds in the Resources menu. Both sample feeds obtain up-to-date messages from the corresponding sources using particular search terms, such as landslide, etc. and display them on the screen using JavaScript. Currently, messages are displayed as is without any additional processing, that is why you can see a lot of messages that are unrelated to disasters. And, finally, a disclaimer: this is a work in progress and should be treated as such.

Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) is a joint project between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) designed to monitor and study tropical rainfall. A link to some of their data has been added under the Data, feeds page in the Resources area of the portal. In particular, TRMM provides a series of quasi-global, near-real-time precipitation estimates on a global 0.25 ° x0.25 ° grid over the latitude band 50 ° N-S within about seven hours of observation time.

Back in 2005 the World Bank released a report titled “Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Analysis”. It analyzes the location and characteristics of hotspots for six hazards, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, floods, drought and cyclones. Areas of risk are depicted in several excellent global maps. A corresponding citation has been added to the Publications page as well as the links to some of the maps under the Resources page in the portal.

An external publication has been added to the Publications page: Mark A. Cameron, Robert Power, Bella Robinson, Jie Yin “Emergency Situation Awareness from Twitter for Crisis Management”, SWDM 2012. It describes the work done at CSIRO ICT Centre, Australia to detect, assess, summarize, and report messages of interest published by Twitter for crisis coordination purposes.

The US Geological Survey presents a continually updated list of landslide events that happen around the world with a link to the source of news about them: Landslide Events.

The Library of Congress and Twitter signed an agreement back in 2010 providing the Library the public tweets since the company’s inception and here is an update on this development: Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress.